[Zoetrope with Particulates in It and a Newborn]

by Dennis Hinrichsen

🀰 and then her eyes fully opened 🀰 blazed through strands of mud 🀰 time robing its first slick minutes 🀰 shoulder not quite through yet 🀰 one blooded chamber into another 🀰 sweet dungeon of the senses 🀰 brain lonely 🀰 brain punching a hole in the sky 🀰 a kind of drowning in particulate matter 🀰 creosote 🀰 benzene 🀰 vitreous fibers 🀰 dust 🀰 dioxins 🀰 lead nights I spent licking her eyeballs clean like a cat 🀰 already each breath a puff of waste gas 🀰 droplets my skin absorbed 🀰 heart the worm 🀰 the spinneret 🀰 whole days windowed 🀰 dying skies 🀰 I warmed her body like a rock 🀰 a lamp was on 🀰 her eyes oceans 🀰 on hidden fulcrums 🀰 suddenly tightening to lakes 🀰

Dennis Hinrichsen’s most recent work is schema geometrica, winner of the Wishing Jewel Prize from Green Linden Press. HIs previous work includes This Is Where I Live I Have Nowhere Else To Go, winner of the 2020 Grid Poetry Prize, and [q / lear], a chapbook also from Green Linden. New work is appearing and forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, On the Seawall, The West Review, West Trade Review and Witness.