swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

the fusion of suns
Stephanie V Sears

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Banzai Leap

Jaw clenched, the cliff has airs of agony
where a manic blue sprays and pummels.

Memory keepers, perennial mourners parked
their rental cars near the exit.

To auscultate the surf
eyes drill down
to curdling depths of doubt.

Where did they escape to?
What proves their sacrifice?
None see any residual heroism.

The oceanic rage is a parody,
a hollowness swallowed by the coastal caves.
Suicide cleaned up by tide and equinox.

The elements rehearse the tragedy,
never sure when Amaterasu
or the emperor may drop by.

Yet some ears can hear
the inaudible truth
from far below.

An orchestral intelligence,
a threnody beyond time’s barrier
to undying beauty, the fusion of suns.

Birth of the leopard

Lost human sleep,
darkest insomnia
where go giants and midgets of fear.
Darkest of verdicts.
The cranium’s slow ticking
as a clock or a bomb:
porcelain thinking,
gasps, stutters, a taste of dirt.
Ambitions never stay pure
like shifting dunes
that keep no trace, or
a bullet horse shooting
the air with speed.

Nightmares of the busy mind
disfigure innocence until
moth wings fan telluric heat
and a presage rings the moon.

Stealth threshed out
by a lunar breeze,
stretches. A pause then
in rustling leaves,
a horde of senses freed
picks at sleep’s padlock.
Absence breathes life
into a nimble creature
of marigold hide,
fresh from instinct’s genesis,
roaming through a mesh of frequencies
as do stars.

Now leopard is born.

Armistice Day

From sleep to swim I slip
hybrid of land and sea
footloose by grace of clement weather
body cabaret with coral glitter
tinted with dawn.
The beach shows pure of history
forever uneventful
lined by a totemic jungle.
I wade through shallow heavens
where keen-eyed
neonate fish stare.

The man also woke to that
butterfly breeze and lily wax scent.

Forty meters from me
harpoon in hand
he thinks himself
unseen in his bold dive
over the reef’s bath foam
into deep indigo.
He charms the gods
with his native way
that never fights with death.

He will harvest colored scales
from the piscine tapestry
hung along the ocean cliff
while I guard his privacy
and carnacious creatures
undulate past him
in today’s Philippine Sea
where other forces brace
for the next great kill.

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Anaho, Stephanie V Sears latest poetry collection is available from Arteidolia Press.

For more information about Anaho →

Stephanie V Sears is a French and American ethnologist, free-lance journalist, essayist and poet whose poetry has appeared in The Deronda Review, The Comstock Review, The Mystic Blue Review, The Big Windows Review, Indefinite Space, The Plum Tree Tavern, Literary Yard, Clementine Unbound, Anti Heroine Chic, DASH, The Dawn Treader, Dodging the Rain, Amethyst Review, The Non-Conformist Magazine, Red Orgre Review, The Headlight Review, and SORTES. among other. Her essays on wildlife, nature conversations, poetry and science, and urban issues have been published in The Montreal Review, Wildlifeextra, E, the environmental magazine, The Cresset, Zoomorphic, The Journal of Wild Culture, Ecohustler, Hawk&Handsaw, The London Grip. Her first book of poetry, The Strange Travels of Svinhilde Wilson was published by Adelaide Books in 2020.