Darnell Arnoult: Beneath Love & View From Space

BENEATH LOVE

Contemptuous problems wait,
somebody’s wavering mistake
shoved in the slouching place

behind Hell’s snow and kick.
Booze explodes scribbling feet.
Satisfied streets clean demons

backward. Lost. Wrong. Little
else but pockets of problems trailing
sleep. Awful bucktoothed eyes flash

beneath Love’s crazy room. Round
and round, come again and again.
Believe in Death. Believe in Love.

Bet cigarettes later. There is no wrong room.
No wrong problem. No wrong place.

~~
 
VIEW FROM SPACE

Stolen hills, transfigured, watch the unforeseen
swirl of seed and body overbalance. Distend.
Vines trumpet the disappearance of culture’s
soul and windshield. Embrace the rebuilt amazement
of home, its concrete ballet. Headlights of ships
cut fear away like a gunshot up terror’s highway.
 
~~~~

Darnell Arnoult is the prize-winning author of Galaxie Wagon: Poems and What Travels With Us: Poems (LSU Press) and the novel Sufficient Grace (Simon & Schuster) which received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. Her recent poetry collection, Incantations was published by Madville Publishing. She lives in North Carolina.

Copyright 2024 Darnell Arnoult.