Ryan Warren lives with his family by the sea in Northern California. He is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, and his poetry has previously appeared in numerous journals including California Quarterly, Poetry Daily, Poetry Breakfast, Amaryllis, Wilderness House Literary Review, Firefly Magazine, Verse-Virtual, and the anthology, Carry The Light. More on his published works can be found at http://www.facebook.com/RyanWarrenPoetry. Mintaka The apogee of Orion's Belt the western-most hitch for his dark pants is a double star, actually A and B: bright blue giants twin suns circling every five days each 3 billion years old and yet still younger than our own star born as our own earth broke apart its supercontinent first formed its magnetic field whose light took 916 years to arrive left as Henry I was crowned in England the Crusades raged Héloïse was born Abélard's destiny was set and a picture of the twin blue suns of Mintaka went forth across the universe and was received by my eyes almost a thousand years later and just as I was beginning to think that important things were happening around me today ---------- Past Life In my previous life I was a leaf. Or was I Cleopatra? I don't know, I can't claim her memories. I have no lingering animosity towards Romans, no unexplained fear of asps. But what I do know about is budding, is spring, is green so brilliant it terrifies the world that celebrates your greenness. What I know about is unfolding, damp and limber, learning how to open to what feeds you. I have felt the thousand little things that eat small holes in you crawl across my darkening body. How they labor to take pieces away, leaving you less than you thought you needed. I know about how the holes seal darkened at the edges. Little discs of nothing punched through you. How you still go on. I can remember the warm, yellow days when everything you collect flows, as it should, to root and branch. I know about the joy of buds, appearing, brighter, tender leaves, unfurling around you. I have known what it is to see the brittle, brown leaves dropping before you. To hear them released, and slowly fall away. I have felt the drying at my edges, the weakening at my stem. Perhaps I was someone else, too. A serf starving on the Russian steppe, a Pygmy medicine woman, a potato bug. Or simply star stuff, the sum total of carbon the universe was willing to share on a given day. But then a stiff, fall breeze rustles the ruddy foliage. Crisp leaves break loose from their beds, swirling about our heads for a moment, and again I remember—and again I am with them, falling back and away, down to the waiting earth. ---------- The Moon Illusion Lemonwhite and smudged by ocean haze I stumble upon a huge softball moon suspended above the twilit hillside. Not the cold, bright golfball moon sailing through the high dark sky but its bigger, easier laughing cousin full as my moonshining eyes as my twilit heart. Which they say is a lie an inflationary trick played on my wanting mind when the round moon hangs just above the lip of some horizon-- and which I can test by holding up to it an object of reference, a dime from my pocket, to see that, really, the broad, desirous low moon and the thin, austere high moon are exactly the same size. But why should I believe that? Does my own size not change-- though never at all compared to the dime in your pocket? Don't I grow from thin to bursting to equanimity to tears within a single day, without ever changing the dimensions of my skin? Don't you? Leave your dime in your pocket, we have enough objects of reference and no need to test the fullness of our hearts. ---------- Flesh The chicken is slippery as I strip meat from bone, slippery from the fat woven like a thread through the plump carcass carcass, corpse, body—it’s all context the chicken arrived roasted, skin crispy and seasoned herb-covered, smelling delicious, and my job my job is to strip soft, white flesh from rubbery bone flesh for soups, for salads, flesh for a week of meals, and not to sneak too much too much lures me in as I carefully separate tissue from sinew fat from meat, muscle from cartilage and fascia pull apart what bound this bird when it still breathed, not now now’s not the time to feel nerve, to think of this bird engineered to be drawn and quartered on kitchen counters while wildness is wound deep-set in all of our bones bones I dare not to toss my dog: poised, all coiled tension untroubled by concern for the bird, his singular focus-- waiting, wolflike, to break open the bones of his desire ---------- A Midwinter Hymn From Orion’s winter field of darkening we are received into the clear and cold hoof-footed, winged the shortest, the darkest the furthest tilted on the holy axis away from the heart of the circling sun. Holy holy hosanna when the cows are slaughtered, the beer fermented. Feast now and light now the holy lights drive out the fearsome dark light the longest, light the coldest begin now the tilting forward into the light let the lights be lighted and let light and love and joy come to you, and to you your wassail too and begin the holy holy return of the sun, of the Christchild, born this holy Saturnalia, this festival of lights begun this Brumalia, this Advent this Amaterasu, this Choimus, this Inti Raymi, this Koliada. Holy, holy Thai Pongal, holy Junkanoo, holy is this Makara Sankranthi, this Soyal, this Şeva Zistanê. Holy is Shab-e Yaldā, Dongzhi and Korochun, holy Shalako and holy Goru. This, this holy Chanukah, this Yule, this Ziemassvētki, this Christmas. Christmas, Christmas carried in by fickle Julenisse, leaping Joulupukki, by merry ghosts, by Ded Moroz, flown in by La Bafana, walked in by the Samichlaus, Weihnachtsmann, Chyskhaan St. Lucy, St. Nicholas, St Basil Kleesschen, Tió de Nadal. Noel Noel born is the King of Israel come let us adore him. Adore Matisyahu, Judah Maccabee, adore ancient Odin, give thanks to Dažbog, Thank you to wise Father Christmas, give thanks to gentle Santa Claus. O holy night Silent night when all is calm, bright mount then the holly, the ivy mount the greens of mistletoe bring in the ancient pagan tree. Light, light, light the ancient and the scented log light, light, bring forth the evergreens and light the 9 holy candles for 8 holy nights and remember the reason for the season of the ending, the bonedeep and the most ancient, the beginning, the slaughtering, the fermenting, the feasting and the light the light that weakens the ending darkness that light that lights the starting sun.
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