The Lost Pleiad (excerpts of a work in progress) | KELSEY HENNEGEN

The Lost Pleiad (excerpts of a work in progress)

KELSEY HENNEGEN | VERMONT Between belonging and the void I float the sky-crowned lake but I’ve a wanton will for ocean a thirst for danger and salt. Rip tides a luxuriant undercurrent and waves—the wreck of them. Their absolute weight. What happens to a pair of lungs and how my scalp strains hair tangling the flood with every dive to dodge the break.

You became a burr in my brain prickling your way. Barriers into blood. Between my body and a sea of yearning I float the Pleiades because every daughter needs like an urge for surety and sun to be nearer her ill-fated father.

my father titanic : an atlas of strength & pain secreted : west to earth’s edge : my father holding heaven my father : leaving me prone & lonely : heaving

In indigo I figure myself a nymph the youngest of seven sisters I am miraculous and merciless made mortal in his grip marooned in the world of men I am ontological and ridiculous thrust down against oceaned sky transmogrified my flaking flesh luminous one long vein bowels to belly to brain

neither girls nor doves : we shoulder the sky we : a fistful of stars under adamant night desperate : daughters : yoked celestial

You shut your eyes open then shut furious irises abrupt in pungent silence and in the silence is possibility a monstrous sun unfurling itself because I came to you

furrowed brain and all. Inviolable. (or at least I’d believed myself to be.)

the fact of him : huge : a hunter well-arrowed : the fact of a prick : & its puncture the wound : o how it binds me to this : the fact of a body

Me: orphaned and alone. Enter: Him. Cocksure. Savage. I became catastrophe. Rigid-spined and brackish. Gravel vivid in my gut. Mouth full of velvet. Green heat ionizes then police. Then memory as ink. A fumarole-licked lobe then the exam as cotton on pelvis. Limbic a dumb blank full of light.

my mother : abundant : the daughter of oceans she too knew : the sea & how lean : its protection can be : she knew to flee she : taught me how : hunters haunt : tireless : without awe

Now the taste of sour milk. Now the fantasy as a lie we choose to make true. Today I am flushed ample with ghosts. This is to say that aweless I will myself to forget the father. Forget precarity. Forget the fact of a sea soon to roar and rend and woe when homesickness for land overcomes me. There is no more land.

There is no dipper. No sisters. Orion unfastens his belt. Undoes his zipper.