Bevin O'Connor
Harvest Syntax
you want to follow the sun like a sibling: under the earth—
what quakes at abandon will always come back for more;
what you fear is the death
which waits in the dying—i’ll tell you what
i’ve seen: grief turning
a face to stone—form without expression, the matter no matter
becomes, there in the ground, it flickers
like the lick of iron—it takes the parched birch
out at the knees: felling is falling
when you find yourself
the object, objecting—
you cling to shape as you leave,
take on the onslaught of calcite, claw
up a cry one mineral at a time;
i meant to unlearn this: the song which opens only in evening,
sprawling the grasses & calling as it catches
the last of you: a self that came apart & couldn’t
stop: you litter the ground, waiting
for the field writhing with color—
far off i hear a sound which won’t
last the summer: the vesper, its
sharp mouth opening as if
to swallow what remains, a bite
of purple stretching over low hills,
a reminder that after all
your absence holds
a hard note in me.
Bevin O'Connor is a poet and educator from Southern California and received her MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa and the University of Southern California. A 2022 finalist for the Best of the Net Anthology, her work can be found or is forthcoming in Third Coast, Annulet, Palette Poetry, Afternoon Visitor, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Poetry at the University of Houston, where she is an Inprint Nina and Michael Zilkha Fellowship recipient and serves as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast magazine.
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