Title: sun dial and other poems
These are poems that I wrote while I was traveling through a very bleak period of depression. They explore a mental space and a world in which it appears that life is drained of it's animating factor, and merely filled with material forms. While the tone is somewhat nihilistic, I hope that they convey a sense of being on the verge of piercing through the caul of inertia and despair. And that through the distinct absence of the narrator's spiritual identity or sense of purpose, they hint at it's burgeoning presence.
form & void take a look around. now look harder. everything is what it is. just as real, just as flawed just as impermanent as the things you've merely imagined to be. your body is just a body. not something abstract like lines or shadows or shapes.
things are only what they are. perhaps as meaningless as letters and words were before sound pronounced them out.
this world is a language you do not speak fluently and no one truly knows, just the few key phrases we are each a foreigner to reality, dumb tourists miming with our hands speaking exaggeratedly in loud voices, trying desperately to disrupt a calm that is long and ancient and knowing in it's silence, like words read quietly off of a page and kept to yourself.
_____________________________________________ ISARAE KOVAL is a writer and visual artist residing in Mesa, Arizona. Her writing has appeared in Sky Island Journal, Artspace QuARTerly, Poets and Muses Podcast and Phoenix New Times. Her writing often explores themes of anomie, alienation, and the personal and collective shadow. She is currently at work on her first collection of poetry, The Valleys of the Dead.