Poems by Lauren Lockhart
Archives: by Issue | by Author Name
If I can be in my bones, I will be truthful
by Lauren Lockhart
From Canary Summer 2014
Lauren lives on the eastern side of the Colorado Rocky Mountains in the South Platte River watershed.
Aqueous quiet throbs
like a separate arrangement of veins
turning soundless bright nothing
in coated circles under
a cloak of cells. The atoms
of my blood aren't
mine
I am borrowing this molecular tangle
from the forest
from the moss
from the tributaries and
I am reminded of this:
our vascular order learned how to branch
from the river
and from the black arms of the winter
walnut tree
that fingers a blank sky
in the glinting Indiana dusk.
© Lauren Lockhart
Sangre de Bolivia
by Lauren Lockhart
River-blood curls
her back into earth-flesh
heavy with red from the slaughterhouse
five miles south
her surface offers shiny spots of oil and
hospital leftovers from
three miles west-
here is where the flesh of us
is confused for the flesh of cattle.
Poison river, life-blood turning,
the children carry buckets of her home.
dark and rotting water
but Thirst will rob you of your lips
if you let him stay too long.
.
From the east,
an offering of noxious industry
vomiting fulvous sour malice into her mouth, the river
swallows and swallows and swallows and
her people gather like a flood in the city
screaming to the north
for their right to belong to her, and her to them
their life
quivering, the river
sangre de Bolivia clots sticky, infected and blistering
while the money pollinates,
while the taps run dry.
© Lauren Lockhart