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She Manifests Her Own Ineffable

Other than the intricacies of the creak sky blackness that opens

against the horizon A horizon not imagined as any way to anything

Crouch in some ways recessing against a train of No a well of

intentions and cliché A well with a surface that you understand to be

water but reflects not me but you not her or him or him but you You

with your eyebrows crooked like night bending through a stairwell

Not her or dried egg white on the counter Between the first day and

the Second day Other Intricacies of royal Sunshine say Sunshine

again and again until it is all consonant and vowel Nothing Else

Nothing not there or there either Here

Ruth Ellen Kocher is the author of several poetry collections, including godhouse (Omnidawn Press, 2023); Third Voice (Tupelo Press, 2016); domina Un/blued (Tupelo Press, 2013), winner of the PEN Open Book Award and the Dorset Prize; and Desdemona’s Fire (Lotus Press, 1999), winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Award for African American Poets.

About Ruth Ellen Kocher

Themes

Environment

Identity

Nature

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Grow

I have a red onion in a green bowl on my kitchen counter
sprouting a green stalk that began as a little green haystack

bump, a knobby cyst, really, that broke surface, felt like what
I imagine I’m feeling for when I rub my breasts in the shower,

my eyes closed as if water is a blindfold allowing me to feel
within that dark any small homicide growing within me. I can’t

Ruth Ellen Kocher

2023

We May No Longer Consider the End

The time of birds died sometime between
When Robert Kennedy, Jr. disappeared and the Berlin
Wall came down. Hope was pro forma then.
We’d begun to talk about shelf-life. Parents
Thought they’d gotten somewhere. I can’t tell you
What to make of this now without also saying that when
I was 19 and read in a poem that the pure products of America go crazy
I felt betrayed. My father told me not to whistle because I
Was a girl.

Ruth Ellen Kocher

2018

Skit: Sun Ra Welcomes the Fallen

Jupiter means anger. Sun Ra does not. Sun Ra dances the Cake Walk on Saturn’s pulpy eyes. If you believe that, I’ll tell you another one. The first is 13 and the next is 20. They were not good boys but they were boys. They were boys who died for this thing or that. The next was 16 and the last was 18. One had a cell phone. One had a gun. On earth, a goose opens its chest to a sound. The goose takes the bullet this way. A sacrifice denied to the wind since there is no such thing as sacrifice anymore having succumbed to fever and the millennium.

Ruth Ellen Kocher

2016

Poems

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She Manifests Her Own Ineffable

More by this poet

Grow

We May No Longer Consider the End

Skit: Sun Ra Welcomes the Fallen

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