three poems

Elizabeth Robinson

The woman says

I have an encrypted pregnancy:

The fetus

is dispersed through my organs,

throughout all the parts of my body.

When the Lord

sounds the trumpet,

the fetus will reassemble itself

and I will give birth to the Messiah.

She wheezes through loose soil and—

because souls are diaphanous—she sings falsetto.

Though pale, palest, she is

livid against the pallor of the given world.

The number eleven is arbitrary, nonetheless

“resurrection” must appear in the middle line

of the poem. High,

higher, until all the dogs in creation

shudder at the pitch of it,

her loose weave, her gauzy tune. She bends her hips, stands

her up, chalky soil draped around the white blush of her ankles,

and so transparent the song that levitates beyond the range of

human perception.

Epiphany jilts revelation: lover tracks the

movements of ex-lover, blotched footprints pressed in dirt.

This holey vessel. This. This. This

in a sequence, no, a clot, no, a knotted cluster of veins

that claimed itself as a body.

An aphrodisiac that stirs the no-body.

Adoration that scorns fulfillment as excess.

To renege on delirium, erotic error

wandering without shoes, then without feet.

Plasma

bending from forgotten arteries or

through them.

Orgiastic sequence diffused in a cloud of pronouns.