We are here for mottled, for swerve and slingshot.
Here to collect our things, for further study, mis-reading
the room, for whatever our bodies will give us, haunted
or full. For lavender. Darkened doorways.
We are for hunger and crooked brow.
We are here for pomegranate bitterness on the tongue,
woo-box, blessings and blare, proponents of flim-flam
descending into the belly of autumn, this year’s red burnt
dull, luck turned slovenly.
We are for holding, pulse and danger, here for it, here.
Gale Batchelder has work published in Colorado Review, Lily Poetry Review, What Rough Beast (Indolent Books), SpoKe4, Amethyst Arsenic, and White Whale Review. Her book, Chalk Song, a poetic collaboration with Judson Evans and Susan Berger-Jones, was published in 2021 by Lily Poetry Review Books. Chalk Song is an engagement with “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” Werner Herzog’s documentary about paleolithic cave art. Gale’s work is included in two anthologies of ekphrastic poems, New Smoke and Triumph of Poverty, from Off the Park Press. Recently she has collaborated with teXtmoVes in a performance of her poem, The Body Apologies. Gale lives in Cambridge, MA.