In youth we dawdle over flesh in the water,
primed for our prime like an irreducible number.
Reaping dividends from Arctic melt, we look
to the parity of starlight and the perennial
rotation of ground-level fuel. Nefarious grains
grow row upon row on a landscape peppered
with invention. Noteworthy wings slip
echolocation. What do the bees stipulate, or
the last wolverine unbound from a glacier?
The hairline-fractured earth revises who and what exists.
Through rainout and burnout, animation erodes.
In senescence we dally with locked vertebrae. We seek
a strawberry asylum in which to nibble light transformed
into substance. We too are substance. Verifiably tasty.
Alan Elyshevitz
Alan Elyshevitz is the author of a collection of stories, The Widows and Orphans Fund (SFA Press), a poetry collection, Generous Peril (Cyberwit), and five poetry chapbooks, most recently Approximate Sonnets (Orchard Street). Winner of the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, he is a two-time recipient of a fellowship in fiction writing from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
