Supernova

Silene Stenophylla

Just like you, permafrost hides

life. In Siberia, scientists find flower

seeds in the burrows of frozen squirrels

that lie between thick mammal teeth.

The Arctic is the paradox of brutal hope.

Look, even extinction has something

to give. Even a thirty-two-thousand

year-old flower from the ice age

can bloom, why wouldn’t you?

Deaf Things

I walk among deaf things,

the sea, a stump, scavengers,

parents. I tell them about the words,

how they grow in me until dawn,

how the limbs of their letters

hurt my throat. I tell them a secret

about myself, an ember floating

inside me, carrying the amorphous shape

of a poem. But I see everyone’s ears

melt like icicles under sunlight,

so I stop singing, and I cut

an apricot in two, throw it down.

Each half falls on the sand

like an ear. I watch sentences bloom

around me like rare flowers

in radiant colours that no one

has seen before. I pluck them

one by one to layer petal

upon petal on the silent pages.

Self-Portrait as a Blue Lobster

A lobster can drop a bright blue claw and go on

like nothing has happened. Meanwhile other lobsters

will feed on that claw—that’s how life circulates

to recreate itself by still sliding in the darkest saltwater,

carrying an absence. Now it looks like one-clawed

imperfection, but before long it’ll be bluer than ever.

Supernova

Behind the cumulus

of carbon, the Sun goes

extinct. The Earth turns

achromatic in silence.

Pallid people of a sea town

become plastic insects

wearing gas masks.

Neon beams of a lighthouse

from a cliff invite them

to LIVE by flashing

four letters in Morse code.

Still they know how

impossible it is to live

and grow without dying first:

even a star must collapse

to bloom into a supernova,

becoming billions

of times brighter than the Sun.