Three Poems|Shana Ross
Edge
I went out early
ahead of the rain
thinking
this will motivate me
to run faster
to beat the storm home
I found myself
alone
on the trails
this weather
is not for the faint-hearted
the air swirls
warm and cold
the sky dark
heavy
coming towards us
and I’m running, running
to hear my own footbeats
instead of my heart
beating fast
when I am still.
Haunting
No, ghosts are what you dig up, solid and lumpy and grown
to their own design. Whisper incomplete secrets into the opening
of a burl and wait – until the chafing from the bark has healed
on your cheek and at least three rains. Search where you do not expect
anything to be underground – here, it’s all connected
the way we grasp a single root & shudder as it twitches and swells.
Ghosts lie there like potatoes. You must unearth them without tools
save your own hands. Otherwise, left long enough, their heart wrinkles,
feeds sprout pushing into the air to become perennial
haunts bearing elderflowers, and, if pollinated, berries
the juice wine-dark and collected, reduced by the careless
into cyanide. The philosophy professor sickened herself
in just such a manner, though she should have known better.
We only say that because she is well-versed in the classics.
She and I have collected prestige to nest like magpies stealing tin
bits from the shoulder of the highway, twisted scraps but
shiny – precious & sharp & prophetic – manifest in this world, but only
if you know how to scry. I keep my ghosts in the pockets
of winter coats, with a ten-dollar bill and loose change that
I will find after a summer in the closet and think I am
lucky & rich and until then the extra weight will not keep
tugging at me like grief. In the absence
of an answer, I keep carrying it around. The sun, oh the sun,
rising again and burning off the fog is what haunts me now.
Good Girl
after Molly Peacock
Carbon date the sandbox of boys interrupted.
The darkness inflates in the smoke, the stakes
rising high enough to look water wet, slick
with the blue of song. One of the following statements
is true. Say lyrics, you. The pulse pressure is meant
for discovery. Dancing. We find morning and names,
meaning: here is the definition, your head up, as birds
count the relief of daybreak with chirps like your own.
Pleas now. Please. Be good or someone like you. Then
he knows her as lips and stiffness, her mouth a high
hillsong in contempt of expectation, her confidence
thickening the air, the way a mother stamps discord
down. Find power in this proxy, the both of them.
What do you recall of the need to calm down? I lay
dying. America is written in bodies – variable entanglements,
severe expression written in people – every dichotomy
obscured by unfortunate souls. Search for a character
horned and hooded. Blue. A supposition in hindsight:
her mouth was news. Was the same. Nearer to me
in both space and time, I wander by the bay in a sentence.
Music locks and lashes and runs around me, confusing
the border of my skin, betraying it. Pattern happens
for a reason. In memories, both characters and eternity
demand meaning, their hunger an epidemic you can market.
She, in my memories, looks just like you, if you were ever
afraid of the dark. God who is a space held, please: turn
wind to azure hostage in the air, and with a word make
the sea present in all space. Two souls look like the bodies
that hit the floor: of the tent, in the woods, in the night, barely
cloaked by canvas. Rhymes up and vanished – a discharge
position of speech. Hands slice time and electrons amplify
the reconnection. Say something, you. My heart beats
with no clarification. I hedge promises, going home and away.
Photo by Danny Lines on Unsplash
BIO
Shana Ross bought her first computer working the graveyard shift in a windchime factory, then spent a good while authoring a stable life before finally turning her attention to the page in 2018. Her work has appeared in Chautauqua Journal, Ruminate, Bowery Gothic, Kissing Dynamite, Writers Resist and more. She is the recipient of a 2019 Parent-Writer Fellowship to Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and serves as an editor for Luna Station Quarterly.
