my nose is turning into a potato
my face is furrowed as a well-plowed field where one might grow such a potato
my teeth are turning into kernels of corn left too long on the cob
my hair is frosted like the teeth-rotting pastries i buy at the bagel place
the girl working the counter there is young and beautiful
(nut-brown hair, clear green eyes)
but i am a field of potatoes and sun-dried corn iced with hoarfrost, not dusted in sugar
and while i cannot deny my eyes (they won’t cease their seeing)
my hearing is not completely shot, and i can hear what time is telling me
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
clusters of galaxies whirl about one another, the larger pulling
the smaller apart, the greater consuming the lesser—here an elliptical
grown fat from swallowing its neighbors, there two spirals pulling the arms
off each other, over there one large irregular galaxy punching
a hole straight through a delicate pinwheel—
but when i try to contemplate these cataclysms in an objective
and scientific way, my mind quickly wanders away from the cosmos,
straight to the singularity of the slender long-haired beauty sharing
my bed, and all the ways in which we might resemble galaxies
when they cluster and merge and collide.
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“A legend of menace and peril still clings to the bees. There is the distressful recollection of her sting, which produces a pain so characteristic that one knows not wherewith to compare it; a kind of destroying dryness, a flame of the desert rushing over the wounded limb, as though these daughters of the sun had distilled a dazzling poison from their father’s angry rays, in order more effectively to defend the treasure they gather from his beneficent hours.” – Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee