JC Alfier

St. Louis Cemetery No. 2
New Orleans

Ambling down Music Street
through the squelched light

of an afterstorm, footpaths
buckling, I hear a young woman

explain to her lover why graves
surmount the ground,

how a body’s best ballasted
above the hunger of storms

and summer’s claustral swelter,
tombs suspended over floodswell

the way the passerelle leads penitents
to the tidal island of Mont-Saint-Michel.

Tomorrow, he will watch her dive
in the low surf at a Gulf Coast resort,

the tide creased by her breaststrokes,
by the hungering spark of a seabird.

.

The Story You Tell Yourself Leaving the High Line
on a Looming Manhattan Winter

The world is footfalls through unnegotiable cold.
Rilke’s dire angel in all her beautiful fear.

There are unlocked doors you could enter.
But you wouldn’t want to. Even unseen.

Cannabis burns the breeze that lifts nightbirds
breaking moonlight over their wings.

A saxophone’s slow walk through that same air
means it’s easy to mistake hunger for love.

Through a groundfloor window you catch a woman
brushing her hair at a pace that could be anger or grief.

Or catch the pious silence of a midnight cathedral
whose votive glow makes up for light you’ve lost.

And if you miswander into a knifepoint fate
I know a trauma nurse on night shift at Mount Sinai

who will cup your bloodied hand
like a wounded starling in a childhood fairy tale.

.

JC Alfier’s (they/them) most recent book of poetry, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Press (2020). Journal credits include Faultline, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, River Styx, Southern Poetry Review and Vassar Review. They are also an artist doing collage and double-exposure work after the styles of Toshiko Okanoue, Francesca Woodman, and especially Katrien De Blauwer.

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