Emily Judkins

Smith College, Northampton, MA, USA

kneel into the knell shaped out of salable 

solipsism, the mimicry bells emerging with ersatz 

emergency melted into tolls in tombs and tolls, 

tolling up the toiling sounds of telling peace 

but piercing ears, all cracked crooked cosmetology of cosmogony of

spreading all the sound that fit into the

dark sun of preeminence, of how little permanence

can permeate in this permissiveness of light, how

permissible missed notes can be when Your body 

is the universe and You swing between untenable winds

touched by never being and holding all this Tenderness as

You let it all ring out, ringing around the roses as

wilting waits for the embodiment of all of You to shutter out of

opuses and into the final forgiveness, the dipping moonlight,

Your graceless hand grinning as You paint over the shadows

with the Earth’s own speckled star, where all that is left to teach

is “this is how you return your legs to bend without warship.

and this is how you

return to the stars. and this is how you return home,” before pealing back into laughter back into the

universe, where

death cannot be disgraced in church bells any longer, but instead

kneels in the tintinnabulation of Your tinny fairies, these tiny

Thanatoses carrying you off into the wind, as all the people emerge

running out dreams to rub out of their eyes as they’re gulping in

Your air without care, miming out their time, and this is how i

make my faith, how i piece my daybreak back together, how i

know You are already everywhere, not making a scene but

becoming it.