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Object Permanence [For John] by Nicole Sealey

A body, I've read, can sustain its own sick burning, its own hell, for hours. It's the mind. It's the mind that cannot.

Nicole Sealey

— Even the Gods, Nicole Sealey

[text ID: Even the eyes of gods must adjust to light. Even gods have gods.]

~ Nicole Sealey, "Object Permenance"

[text id: There's a name for the animal // love makes of us -- named, I think, / like rain, for the sound it makes" /end id]

this must be the place (naive melody) by the talking heads / howl by florence + the machine / object permanence by nicole sealey

Give me tonight to be inconsolable. so the death drive does not declare

itself, so the moonlight does not convince sunrise. I was born before sunrise—

when morning masquerades as night, the temperature of blood, quivering

like a mouth in mourning. How do we author our gentle birth, the height

we were—were we gods rolling stars across a sundog sky, the same as scarabs?

We fit somewhere between god and mineral, angel and animal,

believing a thing as sacred as the sun rises and falls like an ordinary beast.

Deer sniff lifeless fawns before leaving, elephants encircle the skulls and tusks

of their dead—none wanting to leave the bones behind, none knowing

their leave will lessen the loss. But birds pluck their own feathers, dogs

lick themselves to wound. Allow me this luxury. Give me tonight to cut

and salt the open. Give me a shovel to uproot the mandrake and listen

for its scream. Give me a hard face that toils so closely with stone, it is itself

stone. I promise to enter the flesh again. I promise to circle to ascend.

I promise to be happy tomorrow.

Imagine Sisyphus Happy by Nicole Sealey

Dawn Lundy Martin in “Vagrant & Vulnerable,” featured in the September/October 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

#nicole sealey