Five Poems

Sculpture

I ate a cement block
& sadly have no covering
Birds come & peck
Cries of joy veer
around the block
My heart beats
into rain

Floaters

Wax melts dividers along the wreck with vines built in for mastication.
Boulders scream. Night’s filled with somewhere distant. Clank clank—
the mustard’s green. It’s lay, not lie: what comes to fruition. The vast
cylinder sky—background. Feelings are like frosting when it comes to
the elements. Death is a deletion. Look at everything animal around
us, including rivers. A bungalowed resistance to claps in the air.

Scatter Sight

Crystal prisms outshining light copper to the fore. My slack is your
bare. The flatness of bareness, roundness of light gleams, a horse
trot fathoms away, the ilk and froth of light stored in a camera-like
urn. Go forth without any light, the matter of chemicals blazoning
stars in the neighborhood void. Whiffs waft in a penumbra of
scars on a lake. Sequins, sequins, sequins. The sky hasn’t shivered
this much in the milk of any one prism.

telling the future

striped sky
emblazoned
with code
for tiger

bullish night
wind: each
bristle a slightly
different pressure

graphite waves
stacked like Pringles
crest an illusion of dimension~
an icon of grace

shadow play

autumn scraps contrails
of despair chuck in the face
of abandoned rooms where
liquid drips
but an aria un-blossoming
declaring war despite
the brush of ochre fields overcast
with dirt brown smooth hush
warm sunflower honey
ablaze tempered
by darkening pools
pulling inward
where isolation feels delicious
hungering forever

∩

Shira Dentz is the author of six books including Maglo (forthcoming, Word Works), Sisyphusina (Astrophil Press), winner of the Eugene Paul Nassar Prize, and three chapbooks including FLOUNDERS (Essay Press) and Patternation (Antiphony Press). Her writing appears in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Conjunctions, The Baffler, The Rumpus, swamp pink, Lana Turner, Blackbird, VOLT, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Brooklyn Rail, Poets.org, and on National Public Radio, and in anthologies including Witness: Documentary, Witness, and Research-based Poetics (forthcoming, Wesleyan University Press). She’s received awards from the Academy of American Poets and Poetry Society of America.