Blaspheme: To peel an orange with a hammer—
mantle the ground in blood say the tree is not the mountain.
Polytheist: Dog who loves more than its master a single child of two parents.
Xenial prohibitions: Do not offer up your children to guests.
Holy: A thing diminished by speaking.
Deify = or ≠ defy.
Love = or ≠ deify.
Explain any of this to a broken heart,
god of breaking, god of blood, god of teeth, god of buds.
Omen = or ≠ Oh, men. Amen:
unmanageable—the wings propelling air into lungs,
crux of being = breath.
Negate = or ≠ negotiate, novitiate, neophyte.
Ken this: Ken that I long for bird song, ocean crash, sky-widening
revealing largenesses.
Infidel: To peel an orange with a saw, mantle ground in blood,
flout songs of birds and mammals of the seas and wind in trees.
Sex is the wings of everything that moves the earth, the
quill with which maps are drawn, the
abundance counted and laid down, laid up into
ziggurats, to hang like gardens upon the
twittering of trees, upon the
wind’s word—
very song from very song—
year spooling into year, green with longing,
just inside the orange’s skin.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 17, Issue 2.
Devon Miller-Duggan has had poems appear in Rattle, Shenandoah, Margie, The Indiana Review, The Hollins Critic and elsewhere. She’s won an Academy of American Poets Prize, a fellowship from the Delaware Division of the Arts, and an editor’s prize in Margie.
See all items about Devon Miller-Duggan