HYMN
1. Blame the ventral tegmental area, I’m going to coalesce
2. A pervasive sense of disquiet spreading. Like that Magritte-sky feeling I get
3. One day I will tell you about fury
1. No lyrid meteor shower, but tomorrow something will happen
2. A glitch in the deadpan awe of coherence, perhaps? Unbound energies tend
3. Fricatives elide, which means that often
1. We’ve cause to linger; be glacial in the tidal pull of night as if
2. to summon forth ghosts. Wounds can only be healed in reiteration if they’re there:
3. Every still life-esque is fury. Perhaps
1. all ceremony aspirationally bleeds into the future
2. Honored as wounds in the first place. Like lace under-evening-wear, maybe
3. you’d like to keep me affixed for longer?
STILL LIFE, AT 4PM
I started something:
the chronology of a day, mine
a fracturing sky, held
by smoke, spring, birds-eye,
rain tiny & florid. Outside is hard.
Hiding is perhaps easier
amid candles & room-angles
Or screens & their search. So, then
what is the difference between your existence
and that of a saint?
Well, that I never had – never –
such a feeling, tripping over joy.
Look at this work: the stare
goes nowhere into the world
but here – soft-cornered squares
in squares, squared wire with temper-
ing. Faint vapor of faces upped & hurled, lit
by flares. Since we’re not young, I need to
say I got what I wanted. Nothing warped,
no pain soft-rolled,
numbed & sleep-
talked into. The colors, they say bring me something
I can live with. We sit in the stretch amid storms,
convulsive ones. The surprise light is not heavy,
the petal-ing of orange only
where it ought to have been,
the loner-squalor of white
somehow fluoroscoped
& common to the bodies. Look outside: the sidewalks
are drying. With this set of placements:
mine, mined, my day, mine own
my hindself & new self
it is still hard to see oneself seen as.
Jane Lewty is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Bravura Cool (1913 Press) and In One Form To Find Another (CUP Poetry Center). She teaches art history and creative writing in Baltimore.
These poems are forthcoming in Vespers (Kuhl House Poets, 2026).