Julie Weiss
This Morning
A poem falls out of the sky veiled
in the fiery reds and oranges of dawn
as though some fanciful creature of my dreams
has set my mind aflame. Words have never
flashed so radiantly on a Sunday, in fact
have never flickered at all, and more than breakfast
I crave the crackle and burn in my belly,
the ashes pressed into my fingertips
as evidence of an idea shaved to its core.
How splendid it would be to sit down
at my desk in front of the fireplace, describe
the images hanging across tree branches,
lying between blades of grass, hovering atop
a sparrow´s wings. The entire piece blazes
before my eyes. Behind me, the apocalypse
that threatens to sweep across my imagination,
char every single word in its path:
sheets and blankets piled haphazardly like
firewood, my bed roaring to be made.
My children giggling in their bedroom,
voices luminous enough to melt away
the darkness without resorting to the switch.
They are famished and fidgety, my wife is ironing
and the dishwasher needs to be emptied.
So many tasks to complete before we venture
into the glow of Valdenazar Forest with friends.
Outside, the sky has turned a cool gray
like rainwater or teardrops or irrevocable loss.
in the fiery reds and oranges of dawn
as though some fanciful creature of my dreams
has set my mind aflame. Words have never
flashed so radiantly on a Sunday, in fact
have never flickered at all, and more than breakfast
I crave the crackle and burn in my belly,
the ashes pressed into my fingertips
as evidence of an idea shaved to its core.
How splendid it would be to sit down
at my desk in front of the fireplace, describe
the images hanging across tree branches,
lying between blades of grass, hovering atop
a sparrow´s wings. The entire piece blazes
before my eyes. Behind me, the apocalypse
that threatens to sweep across my imagination,
char every single word in its path:
sheets and blankets piled haphazardly like
firewood, my bed roaring to be made.
My children giggling in their bedroom,
voices luminous enough to melt away
the darkness without resorting to the switch.
They are famished and fidgety, my wife is ironing
and the dishwasher needs to be emptied.
So many tasks to complete before we venture
into the glow of Valdenazar Forest with friends.
Outside, the sky has turned a cool gray
like rainwater or teardrops or irrevocable loss.
Biography
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Julie Weiss (she/her) found her way back to poetry in 2018 after slipping into a nearly two-decade creative void, and to her shock and delight, she began publishing her work almost immediately. In 2020, she was a finalist in Alexandria Quarterly´s first line poetry contest series. Her work appears in ArLiJo, Random Sample Review (Best of the Net Nomination, 2019), Sky Island Journal, and Sheila-Na-Gig online, among others, and she has poems in a handful of anthologies, as well. She´s a 45-year-old ex-pat from Foster City, California, who works as a telephone English teacher in Spain, where she lives with her wife, 5-year-old daughter, and 2-year-old son. You can find her in her studio, writing late at night by the light of the moon, and on Twitter @colourofpoetry or on her website at https://julieweiss2001.wordpress.com/.
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