Spring 2021, Volume 30

Poetry by Brandy McKenzie

The complex spheres

I think I've forgotten to write something,
but murmurations of half-memories
have been undulating across my daily sky
like underexposed film, details dark
and drowning in a shadowy fog. 

There is a sense of multitudes, the way
one knows of infinite flowers in a field,
and still falls mesmerized by the horizon-wide
rhythms of wind, as though everything thought
to move together: rye grass, timothy,
queen-anne's lace, daisies.  Eventually, borders

blur: backwards and forwards, future and past.
Eventually, it all takes a flight of fantastic light
at golden hour, when nothing is not beautiful,
and each piece together sings a line so pure
it's nothing we can hear with our small human ears,
and our tongues are left with nothing to say.


 

 

 

BIO: In a dusty past narrative, Brandy McKenzie has published poems in more than three dozen literary magazines, won various awards, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and worked on the editorial boards of three different nationally distributed literary magazines. These days, though, she mostly works as a paralegal, teaches critical thinking and writing to community college students, and tries to provoke conversation about the strangeness of our shared waking dream.