Poetry: Insect by JC Talamantez
Lush, unfolding in exquisite image toward a portrait of relationship, JC Talamantez’s “Insect” plays with the confines of the line as it prompts a consideration of “what words will make” and what we pass on.
Insect
to enter / the house of her father
as if the close walls of a city
is a treachery of dust and pollen
after days outside
where insects twine
in stiff late light
the evening forming first along
seeding grasses
and something of the smell
of children at play / in twilight
mid gathering sky that
compels the poplars
with blunted sun
now fading
to a ring about / the last kind petal
the girl with insects
in fields falling down from
the rear of the house
she finds them in denim / finds them
among the water maples spanning
wide shadows on the hill
they don’t know enough yet
for the games to be cruel
she learns how / distance renders a man small
and care for turning stones by the trail
the autumn-chewed leaves twitch with bodies
a leg / wing refracting
the final place
of summer pink
the brown father works / the boot and blacking
under a dim of
moth-wing creeping spill the hanging lamp
his arms echo love / as
a machined deer overturned
in ice twins
the stiff hind
of a doe at roadside
like teeth on a saw blade / blue lacuna arch
the mother’s legs in slim penumbra
her unwound tears are
a forgiveness of butterflies
popping soft
on glass in high wind
she thinks there is love
between them still
she hasn’t yet seen
the creased weariness of / the frivolous ritual
in the frame
or the dog limping home at dawn
he wants to tell / the midge what he knows
that there are limits to, what words will make
how grief is not love
will not keep love
still / when it would tear
that a child is his flesh not his purpose
but she joys / the little pots of impossible black
rich as crushed pine leaf warming
impossible shine
he wants to tell her, what good men can fail at
how rile has lined in stiffened capillaries
bursting every day under the surface of things
that falling seeds are
death to the vine
though it may put down root
wherever / touching ground
JC Talamantez
JC Talamantez is a Mexican-American poet who received her MFA from Texas State University. Her work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, New Ohio Review, Salamander, Smartish Pace, Hopkins Review, Frontier Poetry, Boulevard, and others. She was a long time student of academic philosophy and teaches writing and humanities courses across a number of disciplines.
