One of the most enriching, forward-thinking, fastest-growing online creative communities flourishing right now is the Poetry community, especially in those scenes that center on marginalized voices — Women, POC, Neurodivergent, and LGBTQ. Poetry Spotlight is a feature aiming to showcase the work of some of the most talented creators we’ve discovered making waves on the Internet literary circles, inside or outside the mainstream. This fifth installment is dedicated to the work of American writer Alexus Erin.
Alexus is originally from Princeton, New Jersey and is currently living in London. Her written work specializes in the theoretical frameworks of embodiment, as well as feminist, gender, critical race and environmental justice studies. Her poetry has previously appeared in Potluck Magazine, the Melanin Collective, The Nervous Breakdown, The Audacity (audacityzine.com), the American Society of Young Poets, and a host of others. Her screenplay, American Lotus Project, won an award at Temple University’s Diamond Film Festival.
Saturday, Bright
1.
At the turn of his head
I watched the flecks of grey
Like stars
Star-metaphor: this change
moves, pales at the eternal-
unable to make its own light
It does not need context, age
inside of age
The body
inside my body
regards such praxis
with great gravity: growth as splintering
to branch- getting all tuckered out
Trying, nonetheless, this business of love
2.
I wish I knew, offhand, the ritual
All in white
to mirror city streetlamps
who mimic the moon, who reflects the sun
A dark, punctured.
My trolley car is filled now,
with Ethiopian women, clothed like brides,
hours before the Easter dawn;
I match, follow them midmorning
Creaking, sighing in the downpour
Wearing jeans
under my dress
Its rain-soaked hem trailing
toward the altar
and lifting dust from the chapel floor
Given These Wings Are Some Kind Of Miracle
Here lie the bodies
of the insects that have visited in dreams first. They arrive, bumbling
And hum into the carpet
Freckled kernels, abuzz. At night, I tell them
The truth about my heart. First,
it was the angry hornet
A terror, now headless
(thorax laid up under the foot of the bed)
Then, a single ladybird wing.
Wings separated are not dead, I’ve learned;
they were blown up
in tableau
Twice,
near Bahnhofstraße
Jarred,
pun-intended,
in the jar of its patterns’ sake:
black spots, with a red
as the ink of the poem notes I wrote on the train
to the airport: “this is the order, this is
the answer”
This is also the equation,
question
Did you know this bug is the beetle of Our Lady?
A gold pendant whose wings retract for time
Tucked away some winters
in storage, in Jersey?
Commaruccia– little midwife
void of coincidence,
A proof perched on the lampshade for warmth
Housed
in clean glass
(like clock hands,
given all these wings
are some kind of miracle).
On the bedside
television tray, next to Mother Superior Herself
I let them rest
where they lay
In good faith
Two Birds, All Moon
I watch
bees rise, hover all spring in airtide, a unison
Move toward corners, where sugar can build
a colony. Desire is a rule for the living:
await what the stars will bring.
Star, present, despite what I am able to see
Star heard I liked art
and likened art to sex, love. To know
is to perceive one thing
to be identical with another
There was a single pattern
on the balloon, the co-op flag,
backpack. This is
the very opposite of oblivion
The familiar
I waited
for night to curl about the necks
of swans, who folded into themselves
Like that which is kept warm
in hollow. All feathers
awake for the river of the week
Limmat or Thames or Liffey or Tay
Swarming, wet with what hardly relents
Day pinned behind
Lit, danced dizzy
La Vita Nuova,
whispering over every equinox
like a move for order:
a spell
that lasts
