#stacy gnall

[harmlesscigarette]

Already I'm an animal you don't understand.

"Shadow Play," Stacy Gnall

[whisperthatruns]

Transformation Sequence

Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself... ---Anne Sexton, “You, Doctor Martin”

I was wrapped in black fur and I was

wrapped in white fur and the moon

was rising like slow bad laughter.

I was drenched in gown

light and I was drenched

in bone light as my window’s moon

waged its danger in anger

that it had not been the prettier sister.

The moon was wrapped in ashes

and the moon was drenched in silvers

and it followed me a committed but

manipulative lover whetting its pebble

tongue as it turned my face foreign

from mother in the mirror

where my eyes turned antiquated

moons, full black doubloons, and I

could no longer pronounce

what I was after.

It seemed from every where

every thing beautiful looked on

at the blank page panic of my new skin

my new hunger’s black arrow

blipping---telling me where to begin.

My giving way giving out giving in.

Take your last tremble, I said

you will be yourself by morning thinking I’d wake naked and radiant

in a field the next day not knowing what

I’d done or where I’d been in the night.

Rising to shake the fine lines

of dust from my hide. Rising to run

until it’s dust and the dust recedes

like the details of some damn dogged dream.

Stacy Gnall, Dogged (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022)

[whisperthatruns]

Epithalamium (II)

...to speak of me is to think of you. To speak to me is often a prelude to questions about you... Fay Wray, in a letter to King Kong from her autobiography

He ran you dumb and clumsy                  through the brush. Under his lush left arm.

Closer to the heart that way felt husbandly.

And our minds             without their knowing making sense of this already.

So long. Each blurred tree         a notch on a clock.

So dark into the last green leafing we began forgetting               the life you lived before the lifting.

That the strangler figs and walking palms weren’t the end            of your setting.

So cool the den’s homecoming that the shape of your hands               in our hindsight shifted

and a laugh we once loved snagged behind in a spider’s                  filigreed webbing

as you lost track of time dipping your wrists into the river fish skins pinking                   your ribs through winter the months                    growing slower but your eyelids moving to a song                       you remember

and your lips mouthing a name          you once knew as you huff lower into your dreaming.

In your sleep running. Retracing                       his steps reclaiming                      your steps

first picking up one                    seed and then the next

’til you wake                   golden on gold in no one’s hold

picking up one                seed and then the next ’til you find where you had                yourself last.

Stacy Gnall, Dogged (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022)

[whisperthatruns]

i. / Shh

Once there was a house built on a hush, and the hush was a dark sheen that divided us from the depths we couldn’t see, like the sea. Once we were hushed like a whole house gone empty, like the whole depth of a mine---my grandfather at seven, eight, nine for as many pennies as letters in his name, kneeling into corners with the floret of a shovel’s head, lungs hushed from the black damp where he kept his secrets like bees, like he kept them from our meals, from me---picking letters like petals now and writing them down as though I have something to say.

Stacy Gnall, from “Creature Feature,” Dogged (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022)

[whisperthatruns]

Picture of Woman Training Circus Lions

At night, it hangs black and white. Yet each eye has a sunrise in it

if eyed in the right light---rust and rustic like the fur of lions

which stirs like the glancing eye-teeth of lions when the tamer steps lion-hearted into the ring.

Like the blazed ring they will step through with glassed, mid-distanced sight.

Like glass eyes gathering dust in stitch-hidden hides of lions

which hang poised behind museum glass like this greyworn photograph of lions

hanging like the soft, jet hearts of lions---soft as the paw

that falls unlike the gavel which grants me my pardon.

I’d hung this image my whatnot, my plaything, my neatly framed fable for every day’s taming.

Which pangs like a dream come each night back to me purring.

Now, the shame hangs like the hour’s henna-colored crown of the lion.

At night, the black and white looms lustering like myth.

O, kings---how I’ve made you kitsch. Stings from the tail-end of the whip.

Stacy Gnall, Dogged (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022)

[geryone]

Dogged, Stacy Gnall

[geryone]

Dogged, Stacy Gnall

[geryone]

Dogged, Stacy Gnall