Image by John Kazior

Poetry Polytopes

Kevin Holden

nephilim

antiphonal twelve
tone as if there
could be such a thing
anticomb the pollen
a yellow shivering
to take your
seraphim & synapses
the spaces between oh
a raven a crow an owl
show me the backside
of the databarn
1 Yettabyte of brain
oh come on now
you would say super
computer cum on my face

 

azeotrope

howling clarity
or akashic field
rose tone row you say or sorry
I mizz you so showering cedar
& dusk has 800 eyes to rainbow matrices link us
happy lattice theory
or scotch tape keeping in
being flow up in lilac bruise
squeak cluster drop
a drink to make sleep tiny
or mouse across the foot all around a blooming
heather field shower your cyber voiced plane
sad sad, go go

 

halcyon

you’d say a long time & the motion perpetual
parahelix for a day break a
rebus a rhombus a tisket a tasket
head of Orpheus in a wicker basket

 

cornflower

return that crisper grey square, aleatoric television
in an emerald light
or lightning bug
in allotropic variety
wander derivatively
regressing for a queen & a castle
8 x 8 & a series of planned permutations
showing clue, cube, cough
set from the start & a winter flower
five points of the folded star
or sigils, a lyotropic series
that could be a mesophasic pathway to a woodland brook
a hooded ministry or black blooded falconress
mustardseed, goldenyield
hand hurting in another mind
your limits of being
pulled over onto the other sphere
lichen, birch, a phenomenal ray
or angels bunched in a corner
head or heart & we walk over
those fields & search ever for
a window frame for the world and
something tracing a ladder something something
& you say
leave that there for quartet for the
end of time
& building in language games
that nonspace by the board
or the lilac bush
charred glyphs spelled outward in saltscrawl
or the white asymptote watches you
every dawn through your eyes

that’s what happened to me

Kevin Holden is the author of seven books and chapbooks of poetry, including Solar, which won the 2014 Fence Modern Poets Prize, and Pink Noise, forthcoming from Nightboat Books. He is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.