Photograph by Jennifer Woods | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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UNDER THE WEIGHT OF THE RED SUN
by Danyen Powell Stroll past the world’s house. Notice its windows made of foreign curtains and ice. The tree in the front yard bears a scar in the shape of a name that becomes lost in the folds of slow liquid bark— centuries of voices trapped in the amber. Such a sad framework of black branches. Its contour, like a human brain, sags under the weight of the red sun. It is said that, on a bench under its canopy, you must amend the splinter of your hour in the presence of your god. Gently, the grass slowly swallows your feet; white fingers of earth lace over your shoes— your shadow stretching like taffy, beyond reach. After three windy days by Danyen Powell
by Danyen Powell
MARINA’S END Stars slosh in your rib cage, Brother. My hand cleats the halyard, a full spinnaker... I raise a toast to that cheap red wine— to that moonlit, glass sliver by the known and the unknown sea. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Danyen Powell has been published in Brevities, Pudding Magazine, The Poets’ Guild, Chrysanthemum, the Rattlesnake Review, and more, including The Sacramento Anthology: One Hundred Poems. He won First Place at the Berkeley Poets’ Dinner Contest in 1998 and Grand Prize in 2001. Danyen is the facilitator for the Sacramento Poetry Center’s weekly Tuesday night poetry workshop and the author of two chapbooks, ANVIL and Blue Sky Flies Out, available from Rattlesnake Press. Bei Dao has said: “Danyen Powell builds a secret garden by words, which is the labyrinth of unknown human darkness. He tries to find the way out with great passion, but meanwhile he indulges in details of the darkness leading him to be lost. We will explore complexity in his almost minimized forms.” |
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