Ida Stewart is the author of Gloss, winner of the 2011 Perugia Press Prize. She has new poetry forthcoming this spring in The Tusculum Review. A native of West Virginia, she currently lives in Philadelphia. Gloss is available for purchase via the publisher. ---------
from “The Tide Pools”
Blue-green to blue to
violet, blue-green to blue
to violet: ir-
idescent slug of
a slurry lake like a jewel
sunk into the cusp
of nature à la
press-on nail, à la mood ring:
the nacreous shell
of a hand fallen
open, come to land on a
shoulder, find it so-
lid as any numb-
er of places full to the
brim of offering.
*
*
I want to call this
rupture: I want to say up-
heaval, but it’s rhy-
thm we set our clocks
to: to blue to violence:
to blue: to blue-green
to blue to time lapse
film of the perennial
gardens in the ghost
town seething up like
jets of blood or ink were ink
power that paper
had all along, just
waiting to be coaxed or clawed
or flooded or dug
out from within its
fibers: peony, iris,
azalea bursts
a gaze would cut, a-
rrange into bouquets: let me
find a vase for these.
*
*
The sea shivers, foams
up like alveoli: blue
wisteria haze—
blue as a surfac-
ing body—inhales the bare
spring tree like a breath:
blue mussel husks wing
open at the sternum hinge
to admit the tide:
as many redbud
petals as days the sun shook
loose: phytoplankton
bloom green to then dis-
solve, interrupt water’s breath-
taking coherence.
*
*
Either that or the
wisteria is the breath,
wrung out and hung up:
impression of sky
slung across impression of
lung staked like a claim:
this spring’s sprung, you see:
you there, know that this portion
is still viable:
either that or what-
ever you’re drawing and hold-
ing within, now out:
that or an orna-
ment—a blue shiner on your
pride and on your joy.