Poetry by Lisa Creech Bledsoe

             ​David Prasad CC


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Even Surrounded by Light, She Disappears

Circling, she sinks into black sky. Douses stars, wondering
how the teeming locker of her heart came to be empty
of plans, filled with sea. The seams leak, but no light
flows away.

It was bone that turned eels into dragons.
What was once soft and ichorous melted away
and now there are needles and spines and slicing
fins: a pattern for something serrate and famished.

Never asking how she became hardened, at once
she set about dying, one of many drinkers of light
hungry to escape crippling pressure and predators
in the juicy, fusible night.

But there is little light to be drunk
in the freezing silt. She's there 
but you can't see her, it's impossible
to get a photo. She has become inscrutable, mythic.

But sun, she will come. Fragile and bone-heavy,
she remembers veils of green water and seacoins
flashing, herring and billowing kelps—all light
she will swallow, opening and opening

above glass sponges sneezing in slow motion
and other beautiful freaks, seadevils
and cold souls exposed by the luminous
creatures they eat, unable to swim against a current.

Here is her receipt, paid in full. Paid in unlit secrets--
abysmal, really. How far she has risen, the threads
of the world pulling themselves loose and floating
suspended. She might wait for them to reform, or fly.

She might become a wolf, or a violet. Even in bright light
she appears to be less than a silhouette.





Slipping Past the Fates

My mother was a soothsayer--
her auguries only marginally less dire
than those of her own parents.

The careless foldings happening in my head
cause me to stutter: my prophesies
shift and shift and I begin again,
using fewer words, more salt and presence.

There are keys for gifts of light and fortune.
Draw one, or shape it from mud and twigs.
Tie blessings in the trees, or scatter them
in the drainage ditch.

There are guards at the gates, but none
of our needs are secret.​

Watched by crows and friend to salamanders, Lisa Creech Bledsoe is a hiker, beekeeper, and writer living in the mountains of Western North Carolina. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and the author of two full-length books of poetry, Appalachian Ground (2019), and Wolf Laundry (2020). She has new poems out or forthcoming in Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Chiron Review, Otoliths, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, and Quartet, among others.

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