REFINERY
Say there’s something sacred. Say it.
Performative speech is part of the worship.
Say there’s a Grand Feeling or something you intuited
when your mother’s heels spun your gut to the floor.
Say there’s a god or God that once tilt-shifted your street
into a model town, wormed a song through your inner ear
that dizzied you with your proper perspective.
The sky was blue and the moon was visible and you were very aware
of being on a planet. Of there being an out-there to look from.
Say there’s an opera hall and an echo.
You believed in a Revolution, a Purpose,
felt injustices crawling salamandrine under your sternum.
You loved someone, believed in someone,
were wronged by someone cloudburst-clean.
Your life happened in rhyming couplets.
You try to slouch prose but the feet pace themselves out
one in front of the other, their whip-turns neat and matched.
I can’t speak to that. I’ve got soot in my throat.
How can I say I love you
without turning into the teaser for a movie?
I want to invoke the muses, but I can’t burn an offering
without a cloud of toxic fumes. I’m coughing. I can’t say it.
How can I pray without turning it into an advertisement?
I can’t hold the sacred sacred in these dirty little paws--
me raccoon, washing just to taste, all of it dissolving as I knead,
shiny bits carried away in the stream. Hand or paw, prayer or grasp,
I shake too much to hold the sacred steady. I can only ever look sidelong
without pushing it off its pedestal with these beady peepers.
I can nestle the glowing thing in a small cardboard box.
I can move the refrigerator magnets: sublime to limb,
sublime to blue, sublime to sum, to me.
I can say We’ll be home soon to a backpack with its straps fraying.
I can listen at the stage door and whisper the blocking to the alley behind.
SCARED-Scared-scared. There. I can say it.
Performative speech is part of the worship.
Say there’s a Grand Feeling or something you intuited
when your mother’s heels spun your gut to the floor.
Say there’s a god or God that once tilt-shifted your street
into a model town, wormed a song through your inner ear
that dizzied you with your proper perspective.
The sky was blue and the moon was visible and you were very aware
of being on a planet. Of there being an out-there to look from.
Say there’s an opera hall and an echo.
You believed in a Revolution, a Purpose,
felt injustices crawling salamandrine under your sternum.
You loved someone, believed in someone,
were wronged by someone cloudburst-clean.
Your life happened in rhyming couplets.
You try to slouch prose but the feet pace themselves out
one in front of the other, their whip-turns neat and matched.
I can’t speak to that. I’ve got soot in my throat.
How can I say I love you
without turning into the teaser for a movie?
I want to invoke the muses, but I can’t burn an offering
without a cloud of toxic fumes. I’m coughing. I can’t say it.
How can I pray without turning it into an advertisement?
I can’t hold the sacred sacred in these dirty little paws--
me raccoon, washing just to taste, all of it dissolving as I knead,
shiny bits carried away in the stream. Hand or paw, prayer or grasp,
I shake too much to hold the sacred steady. I can only ever look sidelong
without pushing it off its pedestal with these beady peepers.
I can nestle the glowing thing in a small cardboard box.
I can move the refrigerator magnets: sublime to limb,
sublime to blue, sublime to sum, to me.
I can say We’ll be home soon to a backpack with its straps fraying.
I can listen at the stage door and whisper the blocking to the alley behind.
SCARED-Scared-scared. There. I can say it.
Cali Kopczick is a writer and editor based in Seattle, Washington. She serves as the programming coordinator for Moss and her own writing can be found with The Offing, Pigeon Pages, Bone Bouquet, Poetry Northwest, and Outlook Springs, among others.