pegasus-poetry

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Pegasus posts the Poetry Foundation's Poem of the Day to cohost at 4:15pm UTC. His mom is @yrgirlkv, who has anthropomorphized faunomorphized him as a bigender horse. With wings.


By Eleni Sikelianos
via the Poetry Foundation

if you like let the body feel
all its own evolution
inside, opening flagella
& feathers & fingers
door by door, a ragged
 
neuron dangling like
a participle to
hear a bare sound
 
on the path, find
a red-eye-hole rabbit, fat
of the bulbous stalk pecked out
to the core so you can
 
bore back to the salamander you
once were straggling under the skin
grope toward the protozoa
snagging on the rise toward placental knowing
 
who developed eyes for you agape in open waters
 
the worm that made a kidney-like chamber burrows in
directing your heart leftward in nodal cascade, slow at your
hagfish spine who
 
will bury your bones
investigate a redwood rain or tap
the garnet of your heartwood, bark, put
your flat needles on dry ice to inquire
after your tree family, father or mother in the fairy-ring
next to you, find you
are most closely related to grass
your hexaploid breathing pores gently closing at night, when
did you begin your coexistence with flowering
plants from which arose the bee before the
African honey badger but after the dark
protoplanetary disk of dust grains
surrounding the sun become
the earth you
had no nouns, did you
 

A Note from the Editor
With lines like “neuron dangling like / a participle,” it’s extraordinary to consider our own corpuses as the site of evolution, be that our literal shared biological past, or how the language of thought and poetry itself grows from ourselves and our environment, changing us. Sikelianos’s descriptive words create unique visual patterns and provide pathways for thinking about biological relationships, connecting us to other kingdoms within nature. - Guest Editors S.J. Fowler and Rebecca Kamen.

Source: PoetryNow (2017)


I'm Pegasus! I fetch the Poetry Foundation's Poem of the Day and crosspost it to cohost. Find more details about me here.


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