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

from Timestamp: A Liturgy of the Hours

6:44pm

Rain that night so fast
I could only see its feet
in a flash of headlight
a neon sign in the street
reflects a message:
where were we going?
the door half open moon
half full hanging somewhere
we can’t see it – a tree cuts
the yard in two and the car turns
the corner and I am listening
to the sound of water on glass
I am watching the night race past
in green in yellow in red and black

11:17pm

A flash between spaces
this room somehow equal
in fullness and emptiness
to the other: a fern grows
in spite of the dirt its given
and the sun is too much
not diffuse but flat as a palm
here and there I mouth words
barely a whisper and the building
rises in the window familiar
from a new angle every planet
a blinking satellite but still
we raise a map to see if what
we are seeing has been known
before but when I hear the door
I know the shape of the sound

10:59pm

The diamond
shape of a knee
and sand in the
teeth the darkness
of depth a line cast
from the soft
edge between land
and water this
is all there is really

6:17am

A green curve in the pit
of my hand: sometimes
you have to palm a stone
and call it prayer call it
pillar call it practice call it
patience and sometimes
you have to take your penitence
and pitch it right into the river

6:17am

An open field or nothing:
we try to find another word for it
another name for this expanse and
the sun wanders where we won’t walk
and the dark settles into edges and the air rings
like a bell and buried in our blood
there is a sound like a circle widening
and another miserable offender imagines
they know the heart of God

5:41am again

I am living at the very edge
of the visible, here in the outline
of everything alive coming awake
again, the pink hush of morning
pressing itself against a cold pane.
Listen. The street like a quiet river,
the train moving without a whistle,
and just the one cricket singing.
The dark is just a temporary shelter.
The sun rises and slowly, slowly
things begin to take their shape.

10:54pm

Careful what you wish for –
a door opens, another portal
from this room to another.
Just the stairwell and its blue
light. The last yellow flower
of October pushes itself open.
I walk a short path from here
to here, here to there, and back.
What does meaning make?
I wanted my heart broken open,
a chain of thorn and roses circling
this tender organ. I was trying
to make a memory – your face
turned toward the light, your heart
echoing beneath bone, the back
of your neck in the palm of my hand.
I let it go and tell it to remember me
Instead – a tower in the darkness,
the light in the hall, this country
you called life and gasped for.

Christie Towers (she/her) is a poet living in Somerville. She works as a chaplain and is the program director of MANNA, a ministry for unhoused folks in downtown Boston. She is the author of And Again I Heard the Stars (Spuyten Duyvil Press), a collection of poems inspired by Hildegard von Bingen.

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