APIARY Magazine Featured Author Anne-Adele Wight

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Three poems

Anne-Adele Wight


Fighting under Bulbs in April Tradition

how veins ride under your wrist like ships

trepidation

how we all pull toward the sea

marked with elemental colors replace ourselves in a cave every winter

under penalty of spring nothing left to chance

Hibernation

arterial secret

stroked in fur how we’re all made alike new bears crack flagstones breaking out of their born cave cute only at first

code rewrites itself at ground level

fighting under bulbs in April

angry fluorescent

fighting over stone bread that keeps disappearing over how many lovers can love spring at the same time

Listen to the sun hum its dark side true color amethyst feel pulsing all around you like a maze of yarn pulses colliding in an angry hive

cinderblock

captive


back alley clanging door knifepoint

nowhere left

magnolia smells like a liquid you can’t drink what will you miss by jumping off a catwalk into the river?

faces flow on top of the current seven billion

blue as veins

calling

This poem was almost finished before I understood what drove it. With the sudden image of seven billion drowned faces flowing on top of a river, the message snapped in to place: a protest against overpopulation, which has progressed to a terrifying extreme.


Radiation Freefall Seawater food supply

word play

vertical diagonal

how floodwater splits tectonic plate in its fifth season fault lines expressed as zipper pockets on a map

where’s home? deny categorically

later

learn everything

too late

fishtail dog swims ashore

what’s category? not what we call species

goes monstrous under milk family redefinition

fold ourselves to paper angles broken eggs become rare

sing their own eulogy

we grow guttural as toxins wear away our voices

DNA kisses aren’t civil


what are we coming up next? marine mammal floating island

Maybe there’s value in wearing evening dress for the wave with our name on it

burn

vapor

cycle

bread

on a scale of one to ten is it better to drown?

Let’s write a book aimed at sea eyes of something descended from us recognize ourselves

confounded

in two eyes one side of a flat head many times market price of flounder

phonetic spelling won’t keep us out of chemo chemo won’t deliver us from fuel rods thyroid necklace

lungs

recycle

broken loop

trash

complete burn half-life seawater


Last March brought a three-way disaster to Japan: earthquake, tsunami, and horrific nuclear meltdown. The levels of radiation in the Pacific Ocean will be deadly for a long time, and what effect will they have on sea life? At a cellular level, what will ultimately happen along the food chain?


What Led to the Hawk’s Nest Game board limits our options from white rook vantage

diagnostic

shows only a sliver does it sum up the game?

explain rules by suggestion:

sidestep catapult aiming down the parkway or shoot toward a museum knocking down rabble of gods too late to change your mind

how soon before mass demolition of Philadelphia brought on by weather and too many school closings leaving its grid pale as wallpaper?

I pretended my credit card theft was conspiracy shortcut to summation gold rush became San Francisco became the edge of the world

now a pillow of water separates it from convulsion sailor knots wring three corners of the Pacific Plate

pigeons lift off the parking deck in alarm


leaving dust devils twirling in heat of evacuation hear what they’re saying? no time to re-plan this

Florida panther paces toward you out of the garage

if you reach inside a pomegranate will you condemn yourself to living underground in a hail of locked cars?

teeth close on your wrist awful hacking open with broken axe you didn’t ask permission

New York spirals down Central Park drain leaving one upturned building for hawks to nest.

This poem originated with one of CAConrad’s somatic workshops. All four participants were asked to provide oracles for the other three. Throughout the workshop I kept seeing images of wild animals taking over what had once been cities and making them home.


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