CLICK HERE TO READ XANADU'S GATE POETRY CONTEST FINALISTS' POEMS. Click here to visit Home. Click here to continue reading Humdinger Literary E-zine.   Collection of Poems By Brennan Fitzgerald     Library By Brennan Fitzgerald     Words sit in bookcases   held in neatly like teeth.   That book--you told me about it in your tight lipped passion,   sits proudly on display like silverware at a table--   the binding urges me to feast.   I will never forget how your eyes glinted in the chicory scent of July’s dusk,   all of this--this rope gutting fever   was possible in summer but feels incomplete in the acute confines of a New England          library.   Those unfettered emotions, that were so much like damp hair   become transformed in coherent paragraphs. Look.   I can find you in sentence.    And I think,   if I could know these sets of words, how you did.    If--we could somehow   unify   in experience   maybe we could procreate.      © Copyright, Brennan Fitzgerald     Bophana’s Letters                                             By Brennan Fitzgerald                                                                                                       I have no power   Isn’t this what it’s about?    I am no longer Hout, but Sita.    The tests of my love for you are endless.    I have reverence for you like a seamstress for cloth.    What am I, but a mechanical hammer, walker, jumper? None of the old convictions can help me.    My life’s purpose has boiled down to this—to not move. Yet still—my arms will flail.    I am impaired as an apple— I will never be Joan of Arc. I will never glide to freedom in a horse. I will not be known.    They will not give me a public burning that yields a deeper wisdom. Violence is like this—it burns like dead hair.      But you, you must stay right there, you must stay with me—     Down to the outside, you are always here.   Stay with me until I can no longer see.  Midnight has a cold breath.    You are beneath my skin like sun.    I don’t want to be carved within the square lines on this wall.   My mind has run over them, used them too many times, flagellated in an irrational dance that frightens my brain, but leaves me motionless; I am the woman with closed eyes now, death’s easy rider; the end is a symphony.      Confessions are in reverse here.    I write so that I can die.    I have come to despise boxes, regimes, mightiness; I no longer want to be the speaker, the   Fighter, the one whose words lay confused, resonate against long yards of silence   I want to sit with you and do the simplest of tasks. I want you to watch me wring my hands from water.   I see us no longer inside the Arctic neck hold that this world has placed on our throats.   Fate is an ugly keeper. You are never in front of me, yet I promise, I am always watching you. I know you in remembered words. I know everything about you. I know the way your teeth look when you open your mouth in your sleep.    Look at my stomach. The bones are rakes, yet   Desire lives here, and she is a woman. She is heavy.  She always swerves. She is a lion’s stomach.   Go to the dawn, that’s where you will always find me, where even the uniformed men   stop breathing and the honey of your skin overtakes the yellow gold of the sky.      May you never know a day without me, although the frames of your pupils may never hug their gaze around my bones;   May you never know a rest where I am not bringing you peace, kissing your eyelids, where I am not watching over you, covering your body in protection.      This letter no longer exists merely as paper. The letters take me.    It has lost its dryness and has been filled with my blood,   This ink does nothing but jump with the moon, I promise   we will know as ghosts.      © Copyright, Brennan Fitzgerald     CLICK HERE TO READ XANADU'S GATE POETRY CONTEST FINALISTS' POEMS.   CLICK HERE TO READ XANADU'S GATE POETRY CONTEST FINALISTS' POEMS. Click here to visit Home. Click here to continue reading Humdinger Literary E-zine.