Empty Mirror

a literary magazine

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

Three poems by Savannah Slone

Savannah Slone

whatcom-creek / credit: de
furrow / credit: de

collectibles / commotion

open my old trunk, find my trinket ruins
fish for vintage brushstrokes
find that confession is a church
is a cosmic captive

here are my handfuls of stars
this is an eruption
these are my telescopes for eyes
my dust drenched fingertips

this is my buried conservation
this is my shape shifting commentary
my galaxies of gaps, my private pathology
my worn quilts, my worn breaths
my accordion lungs, my indifferent mechanics

see the shade of concealer I wore was called cadaver
witness my quarantined attachments
feel my swarming thrusts
wade through my limp bones

decay / detain

worship gnaws at my swollen throat
i dig through recycled jukebox songs
fingernails at my veins
powering my marionette arms
pressed flowers
weaved into my palms
my ugly, inverse,
inscribing a musk I can conjure
a possession, a primal hunger
an erasure of a vanishing
ribboning me out of wounds, hollow ridges
pendulums for eyes, halted in molding
pinned, framed wings
my desire in resin
i unveil my own decomposition

misfiring

cut paper dolls
with unsteady wrists
from my opal skin

your quivering slices an elegy

welcome our imperfect shapes to
the sea of two dimensionals

this is what it’s like to own hips that slice
to have freckles in places only those who’ve
loved you know about

this is what it’s like to be renamed after
every place you’ve called home, after
every person you’ve called home

this is what it’s like to glow
this is a drained pool
this is one snaking streak of tail lights
this is an orange balloon, slipping out of your clammy grip
this is how you sprout flowers from rust
this is a paper cut

this is precision

Share on X (Twitter)Share on Facebook

Savannah Slone

Savannah Slone is a writer, editor, and English professor who currently dwells in the Pacific Northwest. Her poetry and short fiction has appeared in or will soon appear in Glass: A Poetry Journal, Crab Creek Review, FIVE:2:ONE, Pidgeonholes, decomP magazinE, Crab Fat Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Hobart Pulp, and elsewhere. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Homology Lit and the author of Hearing the Underwater (Finishing Line Press, 2019). She enjoys reading, knitting, hiking, and discussing intersectional feminism. You can read more of her work at www.savannahslonewriter.com. She's on Twitter @sslonewriter.

Author: Savannah Slone Tags: poetry Category: Poetry April 5, 2019

You might also like:

An Interview with Poet Jack Leaf Willetts
between / credit: de
Three poems by Helen McClory
by the river / credit: de
Four cow poems by Orchid Tierney
jazz sax
Where The Hell is Shafi Hadi?*

Comments

  1. Sam Silva says

    April 10, 2019 at 1:19 pm

    this all rich alive evocatively awareness of the epic of our human tragedy

    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!


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
© 2000–2025 D. Enck / Empty Mirror.
Copyright of all content remains with its authors.
Privacy Policy · Privacy Tools · FTC disclosures