NAVIGATIONS - Lish Ciambrone

GLACIER AND THE ANGEL OF LIVING

The deep, groaning creak

of the glacier shifting

sounds bone-breaking

but healthy tissue is not harmed

by pressure,

it is formed by it.

The glacier is the will of god.

The glacier made and governs all things.

god makes use of man like the doctor makes use of leeches

god intervenes everywhere.

god made an Angel for everything–

there is even an Angel of Suicide.

This Angel, pointing out god’s anatomy within the human heart,

is called

The Angel of Suffering Permitted by God’s Own Will.

If the natural movement of the arm that sins

is blessed, though the sin itself forsaken,

then so seen and so loved

is that broken arm of my heart

that crookedly

stretches out for you.

So beloved was the violet that she gave her sweet perfume

as I pulverized her body beneath my shoe.

Groaning, screaming glacier

god grinds our Angel of Living

deeper into the dirt.

STRIPMALL ESOTERIC

Like a glacier, man swallowed the great

gold fields under a thick slab

of hallway, hollow

and cold as clouds.

The air inside the concrete palace smells faintly

like milkweed.

Last week the barn collapsed around the Plymouth.

Exposed, old and naked in the field

like the towel fell down around its ankles.

Like the body but slower, it rots.

These times make oracles of us–

which times haven’t?

In addition to memorizing which kind of clover is invasive,

where and when to hide our affection for violence,

in addition to absorbing the digital dust

of lives pulverized by capitol,

we are trading truths as fast as a poem

can be written,

spewing prophecy and forgetting it

in the same line.

We lick the wounded, eat dandelions

and teach the children first to name, then to mourn

what cannot be tallied on all the world’s fingers.

The slaughter of empty sky continues unabated

while in a house the color of rain,

under a roof the color of blood

between a willow the color of dividing lines

and a birch the color of bone,

the Infinite Sameness of Life

shimmers,

takes several breaths,

and maintains.

Lish Ciambrone is a poet, painter, and personal trainer living in Baltimore, Maryland. Primarily concerned with the earthly world of bodies and plants, Lish loves dogs and cows, bodybuilders and bugs, Buddhists and Catholics, and the tall grass of her home state, Illinois. She is a winner of The Wormfarm Institute’s 2024 PassWords Contest. Find her work online in High Horse Magazine, Rejected Lit Mag, Bruiser Mag, Peach Mag, and Yellow Arrow Press.