Ginna Luck: Three Poems

Ginna Luck’s work can be read in Pif, Juked, Typehouse Literary Magazine, The Writing Disorder and more.  She has an MFA from Goddard, and is an editor for the online journal Rawboned.  She Lives in Seattle with her husband and three kids.
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A Poem

I believe in choking silence
from the soft joints of a poem.
I believe in diffusing it
until it becomes the black all around and inside
and the space it fills and keeps trying to fill
and still I do not give in.
I believe in language.
In the way sensation fingers through it
like small remnants of teeth
over an unclosed wound.
I believe in perseverance.
I lean my face into the wind
and start to believe it’s a smoldering pit
cooled by the breath of an animal a million miles away
that I was meant to swallow.
I feel the knuckles of its spine rise up like a staircase to climb.
I believe in distance.
In crossing great seas of flesh with no more than a blood-flecked voice
the word forsaken sweating from my palms an ocean
and here it comes: one more wave moving around me and within
and all the dirt that lays beneath.
I drag my tongue like a rotting fish across it
lick up the ruined words
so filling my chest
I think I might never have to breath again.
***

The Earth and Also the Trees Above

How much of us is left
in everything that moves:
leaves, grass, water
touches of wind?
Is not the early morning light
a long silent exhalation of relief
just beginning to open
into the whole width of the air?
Does not the deep pine woods capture
in their branches a breath
that takes forever to be over?
I like to think it is far too late
to unravel each other from each other
that even before the initial memory of being born
our bones are cut from years and years of the same
smoke, the same robust, sane clouds, the same
sun, heat and light, as to make our hearts soft
our blood thin, as to slow the spirit of skyline
into a voice, into a hand, into the weary nest of mortality
opening up like an umbrella
collecting all the days
of some simple life, some rain soaked air.
***

Brambles

If I plant a garden I will plant only brambles that grow even when it is not spring because I am afraid of dying. I will dig into the earth and plant rows and rows of them, though they are not beautiful, though they are not something we can love. We will always be children there — the air soft as dough, flipping the dark leaves over. But then, I start thinking of blossoms and the bright desert.

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