#bryce emley

[nomorechoirs]

fr. “A List of Waters” by Bryce Emley

[goreprofonde]

- Bryce Emley, Lineage. 

[lifeinpoetry]

Let it be enough that the world looks alive when it’s wet and so much living is most beautiful when it’s dying.

Bryce Emley, from “Prayer in Rain, Autumn Night,” published in Narrative Magazine

[goreprofonde]

Tell me what you know about salt, how speech can be a kind of thirst. I could swear that once I heard my name as rain caught the fingers of pine trees, that I heard tide whisper into shoreline, I am. I am. Tell me, is it holy to speak, so much fluid in the lungs? That when I listen long enough I hear a voice underwater, feel the Dead Sea pooling in my throat?

- Bryce Emley, Prayer, Apostrophe.

[goreprofonde]

- Bryce Emley, The Possessed.

[goreprofonde]

“ Let it be enough for me just to see something beautiful, knowing I couldn’t create it,          only more renditions of the intimate violences          that made us. Father,          let me hold you like wind in my hands,          I want to feel you passing through my fingers, to feel again like a stranger          in another’s blood, the burden of a man she could love enough          to undo her. I want us          to know our fathers as more than the gods we inherit,          to keep arriving into these brutal and elegant days carrying more of the one who made me          than the breath I gathered from her lungs,          to know you the way          we can never know our mothers, mirrors in empty rooms.”

- Bryce Emley, Prayer for Return.

[goreprofonde]

“And as the sun glazed him in dusk,

I’ll confess, he looked like a statue of a man I could have wanted.

He reminded me of the loneliness I cherished.

How could I have known then how intimately our faith can ruin us?

That it’s the spectacle of our ruin

for which we will come to be loved. I almost wanted love.The truth is I’ve no use for beauty.

And so I asked my God to take mine from me. That night I dreamed of mirrors,

of staring back into myselfthrough the glassy border of sleep, a garnet ribbon streaming from my neck

like blood unraveling delicately in water.”

- Bryce Emley, St. Agatha Spurns the Suitor Who Would Have Her Executed.

[goreprofonde]

“He says I think too much of falling things, of what comes next. Lately buzzards have been flying circles in my head,

I’d like to know to what extent we choose our nightmares. I’m tired of how things have to end, how everyone we love

are bonfires night has just begun to swallow. I think this is why he needs God, why my heart is always playing jackstraw with my ribs.

I’d like to know it will matter if I pray for him, I believe in God the way I believe in Icarus and starlight,

in bones waiting at the bottom of the sea. I think he needs to think I’ll miss him when he’s gone, ashes sketching wild shapes on the wind.

If I don’t speak it’s because I keep a prayer lodged in my throat: Make me someone worth hurting to see.

- Bryce Emley, Asking Father What’s at the End of the Darkness.