ROBERT EVORY
ARCHETYPE OF LOVERS
If like a bird and also like stained glass
you gather fragments of yourself and the earth
to make a landscape that is your life, what part of you
comes out whole? What is there to come out of
but some mother figure that we desire to crawl inside?
Honey jars and lavender soap; wine rack
and crystal stemware; polished silver and elaborately
carved wood trim. The heart is pieced together
with imagined worth of a lover. How many
pieces can a life break into – I don’t know.
Goodbye comes as a hammer of grief and also like nothing.
You are gone and everything went with you.
All I feel is the empty space where fragments once met.
ARCHETYPE OF ENDLESS GUILT
The parade of cars
motor through the mountains
headlights in a blurred line of light
toward the city,
orbit the off ramps
with the silent annotation of stars.
Steam from city factories
a breath
of nebula
the distant color of chemicals
in flux.
Ions of bonding and breaking
travel eons just to die in your eye.
Earth is the last drop
from a drinking canteen
mixed among the many specks
of a dust storm:
the drop thinks there is another
un-thirsty
man out there
with a swollen belly of her.
BIO
ROBERT EVORY is a creative writing fellow at Syracuse University. He is the Poetry Editor for Salt Hill and the co-founder and managing editor for The Poet’s Billow. He earned his Bachelor degrees from Western Michigan University in Creative Writing and Music. His poetry is featured or is forthcoming in: Spillway, Spoon River, The Baltimore Review, Redactions: Poetry & Poetics, CURA, Pennsylvania English, Nashville Review, Wisconsin Review, Sierra-Nevada Review, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere.