Three poems by Natasha Kessler

Beak and Lance It

Condor doesn’t need wings to fly far. The sudden setting of it all. Prairie under floodwaters is what I meant to say. Do we broach this tonight? Your dozens of milk teeth in a mason jar. Strange collections we maintain and forgotten why: paintbrush made from mother’s hair, fixed stares painted for future lovers, the pieces you reveal—stories with glacial legs for another night.

A Trick with Light

She was one fetish ago in a darkened room. Another tally against a white wall, odd and certain, a tangled palace. Not easy to swipe the fog away. Covers heaved off and offered. She shrugged then sipped the sweet tea. Sighed a story titled “In the Cloud Forest.” Keep the notes in ink, she said. Light a candle. Let those little storms burn apart.

Cratered Field

The foreign sheep drift slightly, their bodies dense tears, as they graze. They pay us no mind today. A coincidence of centers, you and I, here in this place. Soft moss. A fine lilt in your voice after a dirty joke. We whisper to not frighten. Pose our heads together for the perfect shot. The contents of our beauty outpoured as we wait for some meaning to arrive, always in its conical form, like slender candles someone might leave in a window.

Natasha Kessler is the author of Dismantling the Rabbit Altar (Coconut Books, 2014) and the collaborative chapbook SDVIG (alice blue books, 2012). Her poems have appeared in Action, Spectacle, Sugar House Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at the University of Nebraska Omaha.