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      July 26, 2021KatabasisMarissa Davis

      In a dream: cold rains falling
      in reverse out the autumn earth
       
      I felt my body & my body was saltwater
       
      I helped a doe loose a fawn from itself,
      branch its flesh, surrender
      half its heaviness to sun & breath with a force
      as hot & mute as lightning
      but the child—I held it in my hands—
      the child was stillborn
       
      In a dream I touched my loneliness, I smelled it
      it had the texture of unkempt wool, the scent of semen
      & I decided to keep it
       
      Under earth, I braided my hair with lanolin,
      let my coils riot like roots. I believed
      my own end, no cruelty. Every soul
      learned winter’s bite but me
      & I was happy
       
                             no no
      I was not happy, I wanted to run
      through the storm-soaked fields again
      & see cold branches
      standing naked as a man
      & tell my mother I’m sorry
      for our twinned sorrows
       
      I wanted to shout my own name over & over—
      for once, it felt like a strawberry on my tongue,
      that firm & real—& I could taste
      the memory of ambrosia
      o god      it was there      it was mine again
      see, death is a kind of longing
      just as longing is a kind of death
       
      I am learning to love myself a little better here
      & that means knowing
      what I deserved. I deserved something
      much brighter than this
       
      In a dream the history I am made of
      is not the history I am made of.
      I am neither a sin nor a series
      of endings. As I won’t be.
      In that world, I never staggered under sour
      bloodbeads of pomegranate—
      maybe there is even no such thing—
       
      so when I look in the mirror
      all I see is my life
      performing the very action of life
       
      my face more than a face,
      a consummation & a radicle
      a nucleus, a wellspring
       
      I never wanted to wake up
      but the earth
       
      taught me many things,
      including the necessity of closing a parenthesis
       
      including that it is possible
      to survive one’s own death,
      though you must be altered
       
      I could almost die
      for wanting me
       
      All this light. My blue heart
      thrashes like a fish

      from #72 – Summer 2021

      Marissa Davis

      “Though I was raised mostly in western Kentucky, my parents are from Ironton, Ohio, a small river town in the Appalachian foothills where most of my family still lives. In a way, the region is the ancestral home of my craft as much as my personhood—so much of my interest in poetry is born from an interest in music, and my conception of the rhythms of language is rooted in the particular cadences of my family’s speech: how vowels peak and flatten like the landscape, infusing any utterance with melody. In terms of theme, too, it holds its influence. The psychological and physical relationships of humans to land and environment is central to my work, and the physical spaces of my childhood—whether that’s the woods of my home, the hills and valleys of my parents’, or the Ohio River they both share—define the vocabulary of images I use to shape these conversations.”

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