Two Poems

by Kelly Morgan

ATTIC BEDROOM

Hours smudge like old chalk marks
on plywood floor as my mind
unmoors itself, green light
humming from the duct-taped

record player. —Lay lady, lay—
I open the journal, burn incense, 
—Lay across my big brass bed—                                                              breathe, whisper But I have promises 

to keep, do all the things
I’ve made into ways to stay
myself. I am as cold as skin
hitting water’s fist. I don’t know

what this is. —Stay while the night
is still ahead— Scissors, craft knife,
windowsill: my flesh watching me
as I watch it. No reason, no

reason why it feels like this.
Inside my chest, my organs
are pulling at their seams. —Stay
lady, stay— I follow off-key,

knees against my collarbone.
Wind rubs the glass like fabric
over a microphone, and
something shines under my skin

that will not yield. —Whatever
colors you have in your mind— I
make my fingers line something
I don’t know how to speak

about. —Why wait any longer
for the world to begin?— And then
I overflow like endings
with this thing I cannot tend.

THROUGH DISTANCE

“Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances.”
—Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”

The space between two breaths waits for a voice:
Silence, keeper of the keys to secrets, unlocks our voice.

Cold distance gnaws— as though our promises
were born into hunger the moment we swore to voice.

In this perpetual darkness, my leaves have etiolated
like the bleached branches of a sycamore’s voice.

Dreams stretch beneath my waking consciousness
as I feel you fill the gap that flows before the voice.

The half-moon lights your new and wondrous name,
and you entreat: Give me touch, or breath, or voice.

Touch is the pine tree’s root, grown solely by your
words. It leads me toward a white shore, a voice.

As though my hand presses firm against your mouth,
we rise like night, echoing a deep, imploring voice.

Shimmering airwaves return your very words to you.
I underscore your breath with my outpouring voice.

When the storm breaks, we shake like azalea blossoms
bright in the rain— opening into an uproar of voice.

I do not lie when I tell you I’ve always adored the voice.
Name me Kelly, and recreate me out of your voice.

Note from the author: I thank Agha Shahid Ali for his wonderful poems that introduced me to the ghazal form. The quotations I’ve borrowed here are from his ghazals “Shines” and “Things.”

Kelly Morgan is a poet living and writing in Nashville, Tennessee. She has received scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center and the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and her poems have appeared in Zeniada Poetry and Art Magazine, Mosaic Art & Literary Journal, Collision Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. When she’s not reading and writing, you can find her dancing Brazilian zouk, listening to Joni Mitchell, and talking too much about her cat Penny.