Skip to content →

Citizen Tree

                              gazing upward in the mid-January dusk
          from my grounding beside your gigantic & fecund foot-belly—

                    i’m not sure that what i see
          spread out against the iridescent blue-black above
isn’t somehow a macroscopic mirror of the inside of my own skull:

                    a massive-scale display of passageways splicing
          into a trillion dendrites

                    all terminating in cathodes
          attracting charged particles from the heavens


                              i am magnetized

          heart & arms & cold-singed cheek
drawn toward your hillock of winter-roughened greys

                    softening
          to complete the circuit

                    that you can dispel my darkest currents

Stephanie L. Harper lives in Indianapolis, IN. Harper is the author of two chapbooks: This Being Done and The Death’s-Head’s Testament. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Slippery Elm, The High Window (Featured American Poet), Panoply, Isacoustic*, Literati Magazine, Moonchild Magazine, and elsewhere.

Issue 21 >

Next >