by Alicia Elkort
“…sometimes I feel beautiful and near dying…” Kaveh Akbar
The room has lost its air, and my sister’s mouth is moving, her words
a soft wind through collapsing ventricles—I’m drowning in summer dusk light,
[can you hear the horses galloping across the plains?]
the gorgeousness blasting through the windows compelling me, then her,
to run out of the house and into the wandering street,
the pink and orange of a disappearing sun over streetlight and blue spruce that measure the road heading west—
Oh, look over there, and over there,
we take turns saying to each other, pointing to a new and different constellation of cloud and sky and color.
Cumulous, she says. Mauve.
I want to shed my skin, become a dizzying display like this sky in its glory-making in an attempt to name the ineffable so I might locate myself, again.
I want to take up an enormous amount of space to feel, at least for a moment, that I am not failing at everything I do—
Alicia Elkort’s first book of poetry, A Map of Every Undoing was published in 2022 by Stillhouse Press with George Mason University, after winning their book contest. Alicia’s poetry has been nominated several times for the Pushcart, Best of the Net, and the Orison Anthology, and her work appears in numerous journals and anthologies. She reads for Tinderbox Poetry Journal and works as a Life Coach in Santa Fe, NM. For more info or to watch her two video poems: http://aliciaelkort.mystrikingly.com/
Emerge Literary Journal 