Gift of Nous
The scarab stares up at the sun,
despairing. The dry air electrifies.
This way or that crackles
at knife’s edge.
Sand swirls up
to the peddler’s
padded palm,
little
granular
ticks.
The beetle sings
her small sorrow,
aches chains. She is
a summered never scuttling
through paper dry groundcover:
her always.
Space splits open,
but she can only crawl.
She can only carry grains
of sand. His saddled hand
descends, scoops her
to eye-level. Her spindled limbs
snag his skin. The sky
is white as rage.
Hush he whispers, Take wind.
About the author
Jessica Morey-Collins spent a summer living in a tent in rural Alaska and a spring studying art and culture in Ghana. Her work has…
Read the full bioIssue 15 · June 2012
Table of contents
- From the editors
- Poetry
- The Museum of Gug
- Blackout
- Talus
- An Ancient Citizen’s Tweets From Athens, Greece
- Roman Haiku by Richard Kenney
- USA, an excerpt
- Long Distance with Camel
- Paengaroa Skype-fishing
- Two Poems by Nina Bahadur
- Gift of Nous
- Two Excerpts by Anne Germanacos
- Teresa of Avila Compares the Soul to a Palm Cabbage
- Views from Above
- Delphi
- Two poems by Karen Greenbaum-Maya
- Taking the First Shot After a Three-Year Absence
- Postcard Prose
- Travel Notes