Empty Mirror

a literary magazine

  • About
    • About Empty Mirror
    • Get in Touch
    • Support EM
    • Colophon
  • Submit
  • Contributors
  • Essays
  • On Literature
  • Reviews
  • Poetry
  • Art
  • Interviews
  • Beat
    • Beat Generation
    • Ted Joans Lives!
  • +
    • Fiction
    • Music & Film
    • News
    • On Writing
    • Book Collecting

for what the same ignites: poems by Linda E. Chown

Linda E. Chown

koi / image by d. enck
koi / credit: de

For Alison Krause

In her honor, she was killed at Kent State May 4, 1970

The girl who placed the stem in a gun
Said I’m hit
And all the world burst
Into blood
As the bullet burrowed
And buried its cold metal
Thrust in living lungs.
And the world’s TVs centered
The world’s eye on
The rough shed minuet of death
On a campus lawn.
And later one said
What they said
With feeling,
Or built flimsy backgrounds
And gasped flatly.
But the fact remains
And gives more body to your name:
The moment perceiving
The violation of skin,
The way the invisible I is denied
And the heroic future
Disappears in an instant
Locking self in an eggshell
And everything you love
Darkened.

Virginia Woolf Without Herself

It was to be without herself.
Not in the old-fashioned sense
It was to be of fins and pageants.
Feasts and banquets of nameless
villagers and fins afar, swooping
up and down, round and round,
her lust for the journey,
the getting there without time
beyond the horizon in this new
drama. Not to write to name what
there was but to find
what she was without her.

Hefting

The Brain is just the weight of God –
For – Heft them – Pound for Pound –
And they will differ – if they do –
As Syllable from Sound –
Emily Dickinson

Hefting is not a heavy thing
to do. It comes as it goes.
It is how to wed the shadows.
Not with heavy scales
But with xrays of mind sight,
“the brain” she presumed “wider than the sky.”
Oh you and I, We can wed,
hefting in our sleep,
mating the radii

without a signified in my heart

words words words
as when harmonicas
and Bo Jangles and harpsichords
as when my life goes down
as when flowers pop
as when words fail me
as when it’s all translation
as when honeysuckle isn’t
honey and words don’t say
as when signifiers fall away

for what the same ignites

it’s the same white cat
before lunch it’s the same
under trees the shadows
bark in the ravine without
food it’s the same hunger
for what the same ignites:
a fin up high in open space,
a lasting outlandishness

TwitterFacebook

Linda E. Chown

Linda Chown is a poet and critic. Originally from Berkeley, she lived in the Bay Area until going to Spain and teaching there for some 15 years. Now living in Michigan, she is professor emerita at Grand Valley State University. She has published work in Signs, Numero Cinq, Foothill Quarterly, and many other journals. There is also a book comparing novelist Carmen Martín Gaite and Doris Lessing called Narrative Authority and Homeostasis in Selected Writings of Carmen Martín Gaite and Doris Lessing, as well as extensive writings on Lessing, Woolf, Martin Gaite, Willa Cather, and Coetzee. Recent reviews and poems, including "On The Other Side of Language, appear in Numero Cinq's archives.

Author: Linda E. Chown Tags: Linda E. Chown, poetry Category: Poetry March 16, 2018

You might also like:

boulevard ii / credit: de
a tribute to creeley — Steve Dalachinsky
Poetry as a Last Letter: Thomas James and his Influences Sylvia Plath and Georg Trakl by Lauren Davis
Poetry as a Last Letter: Thomas James and his Influences Sylvia Plath and Georg Trakl
Mystery Forest - Denise Enck
The Poetry of Walking
skagit & cedar / credit: em
Two poems by Cali Kopczick

Comments

  1. Sam Silva says

    March 24, 2018 at 11:27 am

    I love all of these poems…thanks Linda!

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I accept the Privacy Policy

 

DONATE TO BLACK LIVES MATTER

BLACK LIVES MATTER

The EM newsletter

Receive fresh poetry, reviews, essays, art, and literary news every Wednesday!

R.I.P. Michael McClure 1932-2020

Empty Mirror

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

Subscribe Submissions Support

Recent features

  • My Father’s Map
  • On Waiting
  • Seeing Las Meninas in Madrid, 1994
  • Visual poems from 23 Bodhisattvas by Chris Stephenson
  • Historical Punctum: Reading Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia and Native Guard Through the Lens of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida
  • Panic In The Rear-View Mirror: Exploring The Work of Richard Siken and Ann Gale
  • “Art has side effects,” I said.

Books

Biblio
© 2000–2021 D. Enck / Empty Mirror.
Copyright of all content remains with its authors.
Privacy Policy · Privacy Tools · FTC disclosures