Poetry by Shana Ross

​Shevirah
 
You say break and people think of vessels
Fragile things holding something else
There is the shatter, the spill, the fragments and ruined insides
 
Everything sharp and disconnected from what was
I think of breaking like waves.
I have a theory that waves are as singular as snowflakes,
 
Energy embodied for miles, then at the end of one story
Reabsorbed and returned to the sea for what’s next.
The concept of infinity sinks into you and you see
 
Science requires faith, even when the observation is complete.
Moving parts, magic lanterns
That which is full of light
 
That which exists only through contrast
We are stuck in moments that whir past
Embrace the illusion that a story unfolds
 
In the repeating circle.
Turn light over in your hand and
From this angle we might call it hope.
 
Darkness breaks into fear, despair
Is it the absence of light or is light the absence of darkness or
Are they unrelated companions that travel together and
 
Do not interfere with each other’s nature
It’s exhausting, thinking like you
Normal people think – I am full of fear
 
Full of hope, breaking constantly on the rocks
And the energy has to go somewhere.
It’s razor sharp, the boundary between
 
I got this and Oh fuck
I’m drowning please
Help me no run away I’m beyond
 
Saving – no daylight between
Where I bounce back and forth
Trying to balance and my feet
 
Bleed where the fine line cuts through.
I no longer believe in opposites
Everything nestles more like bodies pressed
 
So close they overlap like atom clouds
You could say they are still one and one but
They are a new thing full of each other.
 
I am always full of joy and despair, brokenness and return
But only see one at a time
Shuttling between, shaking shivering shattering
 
In the reconciliation of my truths.
Dear god, make me a zoetrope
Where the light and the dark and the glimpses between
 
Blur into more, into meaning, into motion
Faster and faster until you refocus and see
Horses racing, someone dancing.
 


 
Ice In The Desert
 
Before, when it was just desert and tents
No radio, electric lights, butane cook stoves
 
I wonder if the world felt vast
When we could not pinpoint each other on a map
 
We knew how to make ice, before we invented
Written language, the timeline an open question
 
Of priorities, elemental needs unfolding in
Purposeful order - what can we learn from this
 
Or coincidence, the lucky discovery in which we recognize
Desire before we understand what we’ve done
 
I file this fact with cross references:
Revelatory history, human ingenuity, survival skills, miracle
 
Our ancestors, too ancient to trace through trees
We bind ourselves with DNA swabs and family legend
 
Those nomads made long, shallow pools lined with stone
Filled them with water in the early evening hours, then
 
Returned before first light to collect
The ice, then stored in hollow domes over deep holes
 
As you unpack the implications of science deformed
By imagination let me whisper the poetics of the process
 
Water laid out throws heat in the form of light
On cloudless desert night, all space is laid bare above us
 
Our atmosphere cannot hold on to what radiates
And a window opens to the universe
 
Light, which is heat, which is energy, sent to and through the sky
Giving more, giving up, cooling faster than
 
The world around it, island of change, of
Metamorphic discovery.  We are the ice, born
 
Too early in time to be understood, loved nonetheless, we
Are the stars, receiving more than we return.

​

Shana Ross is a writer, mother, occasional muse, sometime wallflower, middle aged ambivert with a BA and MBA from Yale University. Since resuming her writing career in 2018, she has appeared in over a dozen different publications, including Anapest Journal, Chautauqua Journal, Ghost City Review, Mad Scientist Journal, The Sunlight Press, and Writers Resist.