Camille Rankine
Still Life with Spurious Picturesque The hillside won’t make sense.
Didn’t the sky come down on you like.
The irrational forest,
Define: Lake.
There is no imagining anymore. You awake
more often this way.
The bomb breathes its fire down
The grief is a planet. A dust ring.
The thought insists upon itself. The dead
body of it, what you have put together:
You run through the trees, but the trees
lead nowhere.
Didn’t you think you saw.
your stupid mouth,
a breath stillborn.
Ink stain. The cold, cold water.
The heart’s slow beat.
and everything is flatter. You go outside
and there is nothing to see.
The Increasing Frequency of Black Swans
I was listening for the dog
when the locks were pried open.
The man was dead. The dog, a survivor,
was dead. It happens
A disease left
untreated; the body,
in confusion, gives in.
the hallway, the son comes back
in pieces, the body,
in confusion, gives in.
A small moon that’s been hidden
under my pillow, that’s been changing
the way my body moves this whole time.
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About the Author
Camille Rankine’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Diagram, and POOL: A Journal of Poetry. She is Program and Communications Coordinator at Cave Canem Foundation.
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