Shannon Walker

Beat your fevered wings blackbird,
Ravin, not by choice or birth, blackened;
Not by fire, or ruddy flame,
Have you come oh ancient minister
...

The way algae floats
Across a blackened pond
Is as clouds
Across a blackened sky,
...

Escalator, stop...
Let the malt-liquor light
Of this Autumn afternoon
Never fade;
...

I searched for truth with all my heart.
I dissected each word with the fervor
Of a scribe in an Italian monastery,
The inflection and control
...

Her raven hair's
Like the willow tree,
And a Black Nighmare
...

Kissie sounds, small and tiny,
The telephone line goes silent,

But not the wind whipping might
...

And,
Coughing up words
In the black shade,
On her black feet,
...

Silence, submission; Cygnus
X-1, the gravity
Oh my God, the gravity
And the fading starfield
...

There is a special kind of blue
When you're twelve:
A kite in the sky kind of blue,
Barley in June blue,
...

Mercury transits the sun,
The moon above the obelisk
In 2001, A Space Odyssey;
Are you seeing this?
...

The frilly white edge of mattresses,
Fluffy pillows, and quilts, lines the windows,
Red ribbons and bows across the top.
'I love this one Ed; it's so soft.'
...

I blow your pictures up a lot,
So that they fill my screen
And stare into the pixels;
All of those little brown dots
...

Shimmering Emily
Hides the sun
The way that our Lady
Of Fatima did when She
...

There are no words
To forestall this
Collapse;
...

The Bumblebee said to the flower,
'This is my love story;
You see my legs full of pollen,
How I hang suspended in the air,
...

Ephemeral;
Sheets over the windows...
Ephemeral;
Murmurs when the wind blows...
...

Is this iconic?
Charcoal on paper,
Dusty black pump-jacks,
And a sky
...

To gaze off the roof is to look into Hell.
The twinkling limbs burn, breaking into
Charred little pieces of bone and fat,
Which then get ground to powder by
...

Silent skies, icy moonlight;
Diana's enthroned in the air,
Slicing through the North Dakota night;
A celestial body never so fair
...

Your eyes are so deliciously clever;
Always pouting, sometimes begging, discreet,
Beneath a tuft of burgundy hair,
Like pools of water
...