Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem, every Thursday.
 

BLOODSTONES

 

Space dust

gets me dusted

talking to the dead

do you think you’re pure?

Eternal banter says yes

making potion pages

my heart knows more

I bake these tablets

with benevolent precision

hundreds of incantations

plunge me into

the sacred rivers again

on their shores

I have a public and secret name

all my execration texts

orbit at once. I draw

symbols in the sand with my feet

temporarily transformed

the penalties get stiff

it’s not hard to tell why

hematite gives me luck

when rubbed

I get electrical charges

 

Micah Ballard is the author of over a dozen books of poetry including Waifs and Strays (City Lights Books), Afterlives (Bootstrap Press), The Michaux Notebook (FMSBW), Parish Krewes (Bootstrap Press), Selected Prose, 2008-19 (Blue Press), Evangeline Downs (Ugly Duckling Presse), Daily Vigs (Bird & Beckett Books), Vesper Chimes (Gas Meter), Muddy Waters (State Champs), and Negative Capability in the Verse of John Wieners (Bootstrap Press). He lives in San Francisco with poet Sunnylyn Thibodeaux and their daughter Lorca.

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Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx