Stephanie L. Harper grew up in California, attended college in Iowa and Germany, completed graduate studies and gave birth to her first child in Wisconsin, and lives with her husband and children and writes poetry in Oregon. Her debut poetry chapbook, This Being Done (Finishing Line Press), will be released in June 2018.
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Dross
when the glacial lake outburst
flood scored the dawn of her
watershed
bones in the earth
she was meant to be everything
everything other than this
bottleneck of basalt
fugitives
frozen within
foramina
this stenosis
unsounding
the tributaries—
the cascades un-sung
hungering
the millennia—
this distended
motherless
mantle of belly & breasts burbled to pitch
//
Chimera
Had you been capable of opening
your eyes you’d have seen
that the obvious upside
to my unique coalescence
of scaly-headed tail caprid skull
leonine belly & three belching maws
was my reliable prescience
to forewarn of cataclysm but
you never ceased to make monstrosity
your sticking point
Even your Lycean forbears’ stories
of the diaspora— of how my children’s
fetal cells drifted from my womb endured
the eons amidst the vessel & sinew landscapes
of aliens & were ultimately delivered
to their new craggy homeland beyond
the blood-brain cordon to spawn a nation
of discrete selves as rare & fierce as their maker—
have failed it seems to inspire
your affection…
Was the transgression of my seething
once upon a time beneath your collective
hunkering in the basalt’s depths
so heinous as to name me Anathema
so aberrant as to exonerate
your assassin’s sullying of Pegasus?
Though murder carapaces your shuddering
heads from my ash cloud’s descent
yet know this: your lost-wax fairytales
have no more tempered the face of who I am
than cast the specter from the dark
hell-fire you dream: that yet I am
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Reblogged this on O at the Edges and commented:
Read Stephanie L. Harper’s two poems at ISACOUSTIC*!
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