Dark Sky City | The Quarantine Poems
By Cymelle Leah Edwards
The poet’s statement of poetics:
These poems are a part of a larger project concerned with expounding on a new place and scenery while grappling with familiarity. I write extensively about movement—not always physically, but even shifts in psyche. So, the skeleton of the following collection reads hazily, like descending foliars removed from the same conifer, but profoundly isolated in sound and texture.
The speakers in my poems, at times, feel disoriented or “in the dark,” an idiom symbolic of these speakers whose expectations are in conflict with what they think is expected of them in how they are sometimes unaware of what is happening to/around them. Water is often used to help communicate or is a catalyst for intimacy. This new landscape has brought new trauma, new burdens, new ways of learning to survive; and we do survive.
Having recently engaged subjects such as indigeneity, climate change, and the Coconino landscape, my work bears witness to the earth, my role as inhabitant, and all sorts of consequences, mostly, how these consequences attack the family dynamic. Some pieces mirror aspects of the desert landscape and other rangelands that have been, for my whole life, peripheral influences. While it may be difficult to find ocular similarities in my work, they operate on singular levels, and are informed by my recent relocation to Flagstaff (a “dark sky” city).
lilacs
I see them, lilacs
them people from the station
lilacs with bulletproof vests,
purple foliage surrounds
the bleeding lampposts,
I walk from the building
hands wrapped around
carbonless copy trying to
escape my grasp,
the wind complicit
at home my roof is cylinder
cold and spinning
fear slims to pine needles
dressed in wet silhouettes
I stop being afraid of falling
of little bugs crawling through
a partially open window
I leave wide when
sitting out here
near the twigfilled gutters
—what’s wrong with a
flea on my pillow
what’s so bad about a parasite
coming into
my bed—
I dream of lilacs holding guns
outside, and violet
perennials muffling
the sound of him chewing through me
fleshy leaves collecting
in my underthroat,
resisting the parasitic itch
scream
tongue ribbed canons harmonize
the hums of gritting teeth, space collects
taste buds quipped, polished caliculus
muffled under inky sphere, apothecary
wish-welts from my skin harbors
cargo ships wraps incisors in
aluminum to deflect moonlight
when the earth finally cuts itself away
from this galaxy, carves a dying egg,
slides along the milky way,
the sound it makes as it scrapes nova
after nova—sounds like
liquified drumming—
cauterized canters into sterile
cosmos
About the poet
Cymelle Leah Edwards is an MFA candidate at Northern Arizona University. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Glassworks, Contra Viento, Elm Leaves Journal, Canyon Voices, WKTLO, and elsewhere.