Willa Carroll
Two Poems
Score for Body as Lazarus Act
Resist the springtime | contagious as dandelion | draw the walls like curtains | ride the bed like a boat | hello underworld | I kneel by him on the shore | brush the wet commas | from his linen shroud | unpack the clay from his mouth | pull the soft clots from his lungs | stand him upright | breath the Lazarus wind into him | zip him in a yellow hazmat | suit that could have saved him | send him back to work | with gloves & shovel | enlarging his doorway into the dirt | his room of taproots | glacial till & loam | dig down | farther my father | three bodies deep
Score for Body as Demolition Site
Mind your tongue | keep an eye on the I | hiding between notes | we play a game with no score | down on all fours | call all the ill | animals to the yard | sweeten the debris you feed them | jump the electric fence | the species link | we suit up for fresh demolition | dig doorways into the earth | break windows in the lake | build tinder cathedrals | as sparks ride upward | we bend the night around our shoulders | wear its heavy costume to bed | wake to red tidal blooms | havoc in the cells | lend your decibels | to the nightly applause | your muscle for the charge | your red ochre on the walls | your scanned fingerprints
—Submitted on 07/21/2020
Willa Carroll is the author of Nerve Chorus (The Word Works, 2018). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, Narrative, Tin House, and other journals. elsewhere. Carroll holds BA and MFA degrees from Bennington College. She lives in New York City.
SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.
If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.