Gina Marie Bernard: 2 poems (Taxonomies excerpt)
A Slant of Certain Light
illuminates the daunting acme of heaven’s gilded vaults
as winnowing through great blank spaces
dappled shafts of a soot-grimed sky, unmarred by nostalgia or regret
plunges the peregrine falcon.
She is cerulean agency on the wing, ubiquitous death
tumbling toward an anxious and unsettled world.
In her focused lens shines sentience—a restive promise
steeled tension of things about to chance.
Some hold her alar flight, embellished by invocation’s
piercing scream
is a sextant guiding the more laborious patterns we hold
against gravity’s jealous pull
that she carries on her pinioned descent primordial
nebular stardust
that she is Divinity ascending each spring on earnest columns
of mounting air that abide no sin
that the stunning panoply of shadow-light from windswept billows
presages the encroachment of deeper, more lasting dusks.
But our paralytic stasis, the absence of any precise measure, blinds us
to the truth she exacts
from her imposing summits: A swift congruence of talon-sharp veracity
with a pigeon’s nadir—unspoken accord
decided in convolutions of spiraling velocity, blood-stippled down
drifting earthbound in silent reverence.
Her exploits thus appeal most forcibly to her own keen eye, her dim form
yet receding with the light.
Shed
Take me back to the first flush of our verdancy.
Your browsing nurtured my impatient growth
as it branched before your eye.
Please? was not asked of one another in the mottled
days that stitched together – spider thin and golden
in their summer brilliance.
I regret that when offered protection, a velvet-soft upholstery
I began to harden. How easily I mineralized
my hostility contracting to a moon-white weapon.
I am grateful for ritual. Obstinacy forgiven beneath autumn’s
claret display – scrutinizing strength and defining ardor
as the staccato clash of bone.
The end came without warning, blood welling in the pedicle
of failed embrace. Cautiously, you stirred –
healing from this somewhat expected separation.
I lie thus shed. Calcified and crumbling, I keep watch
for you. Meanwhile, mice plot my measured demise
gnawing ravenously at our once-ornamental love.
Gina Marie Bernard is a heavily tattooed transgender woman, retired roller derby vixen, and full-time English teacher. She holds B.A., B.S., and M.A. degrees from Bemidji State University, and is currently working toward an MFA in Poetry at the University of Arkansas, Monticello. Her daughters, Maddie and Parker, own her heart. She is the author of two other chapbooks, Naked, Getting Nuder (Clare Songbirds Publishing, 2019) and i am this girl (Headmistress Press, 2018) as well as a young adult novel, Alpha Summer (Loonfeather Press, 2005). She can be reached at her website: ginamariebernard.squarespace.com.
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TAXONOMIES, her latest chapbook, officially out on 3.27.20 from Thirty West Publishing