Poetry by Stephanie L. Harper
Risen
beneath the earth’s most ancient face a body a body amassed of untold merges & drifts yes a birth-less-ness a molten torpor yet dispossessed of breath she sang & singing gave the moon her reverberant wobble her tidal fervor she gave like a flood she gave her infernal voice to rewrite the moon’s wan echo yes yet sightless she gave the moon a song like scalding need like skin like igneous fists bracing against the tides of too many tacit dialects no the body heeding would not did not give the eons such silent hardening no the body however blind amassed of un-told surges amorphous molten however buried beneath the earth’s face & faceless she gave & gave she gave the moon a song like rising like a flood like flames licking through cracks in the bedrock o like the magma of restlessness she gave the moon a song like the shape of her burning a song like her mouth though yet buried yet birth-less beneath the earth "Risen" was previously published by formidable woman sanctuary and subsequently appeared in Stephanie L. Harper's chapbook, The Death's-Head's Testament.
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Stephanie L. Harper is a recently transplanted Oregonian pursuing her MFA at Butler University in Indianapolis. Harper is a Pushcart Prize Nominee, Judge of the 2019 AWP Intro Journals Prize in Poetry, and author of the chapbooks This Being Done and The Death’s-Head’s Testament. Her poems appear in Slippery Elm, The High Window (Featured American Poet), formidable Woman, Panoply, Isacoustic*, Underfoot Poetry, Eclectica, The Winnow Magazine, and elsewhere.
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