In
your insomniac dreams
What else to do
but collar trees
around their necks,
keeping them close.
Muzzle your rights
like a green thing
not yet grown,
nothing to mow.
What else is a period
but a collar for dreaming,
insomniac or not?
while a pale coral sunset
weeps partial
into heavy blue clouds.
Why
so quiet
See
an audio graph,
sound skeleton.
It flickers in my throat,
dead belly to the ghost
of perimeters scalding
air in its lasso,
loss, treble.
I nibble at a leaf's serrated edge.
Shira Dentz lives in upstate NY, and is the author of five books
including Sisyphusina (PANK,
2020; winner of the Eugene Paul Nassar Prize 2021), and two chapbooks
including Flounders (Essay
Press). Her writing appears in Poetry,
American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Iowa Review, Gulf Coast,
jubilat, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Idaho
Review, New American Writing, Lana Turner, Brooklyn Rail, Poets.org, Poetrysociety.org, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and NPR. She is a recipient of an
Academy of American Poets Prize, Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poem
and Cecil Hemley Awards.