An Ode To Burning Sage
2019-2020
by: Mickia Simmons
yesterday and yesterday you caught the springtime sun melting rusty chalcopyrites mineralized into barely pure cut quartz windowpanes glimmering broiled swirls of freshwater clouds, of sodalite and its sodium impurities dripping frighteningly slow in its pebbled textures and smears, river rapids tumbling over a fallen log and the bloated carrion trapped beneath its weight, not bleeding now as much as rehearsing blasé permeation coefficients, no breath but iron oxide threads and swirls following turbulent flow dynamics that make violent spots and strokes in crystal floods, carbuncle and jasper shades diluted in seemingly endless runoff, mountain ice only just melted enough to slough over skin bruising sharp, if it can be believed, mounds of sand realized in a tumbled slush that made me remember how pale lines of saline congeal and
twist the streambed visible only through tears they rend in thin flesh as winter dry rotten leaves, as leftover autumn thrush, as young, heavy-headed snowdrops, as irreverent bluebells as frost-bitten plum blossom petals over and over again into the softest-looking lavender snow and amethyst shards expanded in golden sequence, a one to one to two today when we are wandering, wading aimlessly, I wet my white cotton hem in the water and when I pulled away into the riverbank it was stained a chilled, quiet microbial pink and yesterday I threw that dress away and yesterday and yesterday I trusted your hands to catch the foreign angel shapes, ribs and fingers clenched in today where the wind chill seeps between bone marrow and the roots of my teeth that chatter and chitter teeth clenching and biting over testimonies when yesterday and yesterday we stole tomorrow and tomorrow laying still in today
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