Roy White

Written in Breath

We walk, as always, backward,
our butts to the future, widdershins
round the doorway of great crooked stones.

Your hips are horns of a crescent moon, your hands
small countries whose language
no one bothers to learn.

Your hair goes whither it will
at the rising of the sun
and in the companionable dark.

I know your ribs, how they keep out
the sky, and your face
now redacted like every other.

A body will remain at rest:
a name traced with a fingertip,
a name written in breath.

Spectral Lines

The prism is a guillotine
severing light’s ghost
from its body. Cambridge
observatory ladies
dismembered a million stars, 
a million black-and-white rainbows
stored in a brick bunker.

These eyes aren’t worth
the paper they’re printed on.

The soccer star knew the goth girls
had seen her kissing the waitress
when she found the bumper sticker
on her Blazer. She scraped it off
before her parents could see it.
Years later, when she came out,
her mom said, “No you’re not!”

These eyes will take
your chances.

On this Texaco blacktop
an oil slick breaks apart
the light. The light
doesn’t know where it’s going, but
it knows the quickest way there,
just like any suicide.

Roy White is a blind person who lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with a lovely human and an affable lab mix. His work has appeared, or is about to, in Poetry, BOAAT, Glass, Tinderbox,and elsewhere, and he can be found on Twitter at @surrealroy.