PRAYER OF ADORATION AKIN TO ASTRONOMICAL TRANSIT
and I said to the star, ‘consume me.’
—Virginia Woolf, The Waves
At meridian, the friar plum passes between my hand and your mouth.
We use the passing to tell time in stages of ripening.
Time, we think, is measured in the pull of flesh to clingstone.
A taste? You ask, your tongue spilling out words soft as moonlight on a tranquil lake.
Ephemeral, emptiness is not filled with years, but with the desire to see one body overlap another body.
Alone we are no more than air—carbon, neon, remnants of galactic dust from the first starbirth.
We find the missing origins in the single breath our mouths share, consuming.
We saw the distant observers once but did not know the visible light was the light of our future selves.
Taste this plum from my mouth. Is it not sweet?
DEUTERONOMY 1:10 AT HOME
today you are as the stars
of heaven for multitude
& tomorrow as the stars
of earth for modesty & birds
resting in the unbranched glow
of the eveningest star
& wake to a symphonic chur
of unanswered pining
& don’t you know?—God
tells us we are multitudes
in order to give us back
to our own people for tending
& isn’t it wonderful? —
the humming in the meadow
lands, the star-blessed
prairies that birthed us—
yours, mine, the multitudinous
cerulean seas of our home.
ADORATION IN THE FORM OF ADORATION
I want to dress your skin in the golden drapes
of my willful hair. I want to splice you with peach
blossoms and grow an orchard from your navel.
I want to paint crosses on your lips & swallow
communion whole. I want to atomize you, shoot
you into my veins so you can ride my heartbeat all night.
I want to trip on the tip of your tongue. I want to gulp
as recklessly as hatchlings in the cavern of your breasts.
I never want the plates under our bodies to stop moving.
I want fissure & to deify the sounds of your hailing. I want
to braid our eyelashes together with lusty tears—to sleep
as blissfully as a bee in the meadow between your legs.
Jessica Jewell is the author of three collections of poetry including Slap Leather (dancing girl press), Sisi and the Girl from Town (Finishing Line Press) and Dust Runner (Finishing Line Press). She is also an editor of two collections: Speak a Powerful Magic (Kent State University Press) and I Hear the World Sing (Kent State University Press). Jewell is currently the senior academic program director for the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University, where she also earned her PhD in higher education administration and an MFA in poetry. Her poetry has appeared in Cider Press Review, American Poetry Journal, and Nimrod among others.