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Sina Evans

Crow Hollow 19

Murder One, Fall 2015

About the poem: The process I use to work through from idea to poem feels something like weaving a nest.  I find I favor the same list of words (lately it’s been honey, salt, feather, bone, blue), out of habit as much as comfort, and I weaveunweaveweaveunweave as I sketch fleeting moments I want to capture.  If a word or phrase feels out of place, I may sweep it further down the page to see if it can find a new moment in which to dwell.  In this way, I often craft 2 or 3 or eight poems together at the same time, and while that creates sibling-poems, most of my work falls within one of five regularly visited themes.  If pushed, I would say these pieces are most at home in my anatomy-themed work.

1. dream sequence

it's the chords you keep tucked
in pockets full of fingers, the
clit and chord plucked in secret:

strange the strumming, the ribbons 
frayed at throat, lips smeared thin 
and low the coming becomingblur

 
                                            Coda.  
  
Cut to the poppies,
the click and deeply dragged 
the laying in of fuck and glut
winged things that taste like
  
     honey, this here's sleeping weather
     she slurred and slithered away.

8. to swallow to choke

  

There's more than one way to choke you
know.  Her lips made her mouth seem smaller
as she spoke.  He was unmoved.  She continued
as if weaving together a list of sticks and spit and 
yellowed lace, 

on a ball of twine, or on kitestrings knotted
at knuckles, on snakeskinned charmers or jelly
beans green; on salted skin (yours), crushed whale
bones, the Korean alphabet, and dust: did you ever

think about how dust settles scratching at the back 
the back of your throat?  This seemed to keep her
happy, for a time.  He cleared his throat without
  
blinking.  On minor chord progressions, sudden violins,
the building chorus of bees as they tune their wings
  

in the orchestra pit, the choking.  The choking.

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