Sext — Blackbird Archive

← v10n2, Fall 2011

I have known you as an opening

of curtains as a light blurts through

the sky. But this is afternoon

and afternoon is not the time

to hunt you with the hot globe

of a human eye. So I fluster

like a crooked broom in rounds

within the living room, and try

to lift an ear to you. I try.

I cut myself into a cave for you.

To be a trilling blindness

in the infinite vibration

of your murmuring July,

I cut myself into a cave for you.

religion spirituality desire

Malachi Black

Malachi Black’s work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry , Boston Review , Harvard Review , Pleiades , Gulf Coast , Columbia , and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and The MacDowell Colony, and was the 2010 John Atherton Scholar in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He received his MFA from the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers. Photo by Carmen Radley