Elizabeth Guthrie

Revolution

It takes one revolution
A vertigo
Like seeing the sun revolving
Around the planets
To lose you

To find you
The wave of your hand
At the end of an exchange
Set in motion by an evolution
Of places suddenly by a turn

Of events I am the woman
Staggering across the street
With the shopping cart full
Of empty cans and bottles in front

Of gaping drivers so swollen
At any moment any of us
And suddenly like the planetarium
Show the heavenly realigned
To shift our view of places

To a space where
I am the man in front of the drug
Store asking with his eyes just
Asking at just the right time

As seeing that I would give him all
That I have to ease this suffering
Of our bodies and hearts whirling
A solo melody rising out
Of the music of the spheres

Hand in Hand

I can’t let go.
There has been such
a large handful of them.

Let them go
rolling over
and over

some with some sides
bright and some
blistered.

I can’t
let them
bounce, my handful

pressed open in some
parts a finger against
an open handful.

over each and touched
each over other let such
a large handful go

blistered in between
letting go and bounce hold
between the bounce

(I can’t let go.)

Elizabeth Guthrie teaches Creative Writing and Literature at SUNY, is the founder of Stone Collective, co-editor of Livestock Editions, and curator of the Impossible Reading Series with a PhD in text and performance from UEL. Her work appears in Onedit, Emergency Index, Alba Londres, Open Letter, Fact-Simile, the Chicago Review, and Archive of the Now. She has a pamphlet X Portraits (Crater Press), chapbook Yellow and Red (Black Lodge Press), book Portraits - Captions (Contraband Books). summerstockjournal.com