Laynie Browne
from Dyeu Ary
Ball Lightning Floating Down Chimneys, into Windows, Chasing Frightened Women
When Your Shadow is Cast Upon a Bank of Fog or Mist
In the Southern Hemisphere: Reverse the Words “Right” and “Left”
The Gulf Stream, Which Skirts The Warm Sargasso Sea, Is A Good Example
All The Salt In The Sea Originated In Rocks And Minerals
Sheets of Flame, Broad Diffuse Patches of Sudden Light
A Brilliant Golden Sphere Which Floated Through a Nursery Window
Ball Lightning Floating Down Chimneys, into Windows, Chasing Frightened Women
This thing called reading
curled into a potion
collapsed florid sound
When Your Shadow is Cast Upon a Bank of Fog or Mist
In morning cloak arms
of light fasten premise
Close is to chrysalis
as form is to falter
Unbound ether
a long word
inside a child
A pail of coal to
walk me home
In the Southern Hemisphere: Reverse the Words “Right” and “Left”
Not mistaking the moon’s face for human
alchemical companion how to embody
the actual instead of spending
the emptiness between eyelashes
Nothing to ask the oracle
pulsing mountain—intuition
How to extract self
forget iron, recline
in vast unstapled
looking-cloth—lung
The Gulf Stream, Which Skirts The Warm Sargasso Sea, Is A Good Example
Music to repair
body mirror of sound
latch for listening
She slipped her face beneath the table
the way word enters flower
fathoms orchid
All the Salt in the Sea Originated in Rocks and Minerals
The wolves I met were courteous, but also remote
In the post apocalyptic mushrooms blush
Kangaroo rats kick sand at snakes following star-minded
lesions—saying nothing with entrails exposed
Contours of the day turn and embrace
Sheets of Flame, Broad Diffuse Patches of Sudden Light
Birds carry burning sticks, embers
Axolotl regenerate bone, muscle & nerve
Túngara frog broadcasts unbroken hours
Cubic miles of rock and ash
A Brilliant Golden Sphere Which Floated Through a Nursery Window
Circle, oblige
O blythe ring
wreathes comma
singe radiant
warble halo
Laynie Browne is the author of thirteen collections of poems and three novels.
Recent books include You Envelop Me (Omnidawn 2017), Periodic Companions
(Tinderbox 2018), and The Book of Moments (Presses universitaires de Rouen et
du Havre 2018). Her honors include a 2014 Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry
Series Award (2007) for her collection The Scented Fox, and the Contemporary
Poetry Series Award (2005) for her collection Drawing of a Swan Before Memory.
She teaches at University of Pennsylvania and at Swarthmore College.
Published August 2018.