Poem of the Week: "Epitaph X" by Thomas Heise
Thomas Heise was born in northern Michigan, but raised in Southern Florida. He holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California at Davis and a Ph.D. in American Literature from New York University, where he also taught as a Lecturer. His poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Gulf Coast, The Journal, Ploughshares, Slope, Verse, Modern Fiction Studies, and in the BioCritique series. Currently he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where he is writing a second book of poetry and finishing a study on twentieth-century urban American culture and literature. Horror Vacui is available from Sarabande Books.
Epitaph X
My birthright I have traded for a petal dress
and a summer eulogy. I have pawned my soul
for this opal ring, the color of a pale, taxidermied eye.
If I could carry calla lilies on my shoulder once more
like an umbrella in daylight, I would lean them
on the cemetery gate and sleep until the groundskeeper found me.
For some of us, beauty is carcinoma.
The saint’s stigmata is god’s rose, bestowed
for forgoing a human lover, who will, of course, die.
I died last year. My mother made her tears into crystal
earrings and clipped them to my ears. “Son, you will
pay for your sin,” my father spoke from his throne of glass.
Stars burn a sharp, white nacre until they evaporate.
The moon’s flamingo unfolds her iodine wings over the broken city.
My necropolis. My teeth are the fruit of your olive tree.
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