BY ROSALIE MORALES KEARNS
curated by Rosebud Ben-Oni
This Is a Test
The saint in straitened circumstance,
lashed to a trellis,
squints up at the telltale signs.
Lamento mucho. Que inútil.
I’m heightened, striated,
titrated.
Science--or instinct--tells us
that the cloudy stuff
spread through the Milky Way
is incense,
latent scent of sighs
and good intentions.
For want of a nail the sentence
trails off,
a stellar tale intent on the teller.
Editor's Note: These poems originally appeared on our old site.
Rosalie Morales Kearns (@ShadeMountainPr), a writer of Puerto Rican and Pennsylvania Dutch descent, is the founder of Shade Mountain Press, author of the magic-realist story collection Virgins & Tricksters, and editor of the short story anthology The Female Complaint: Tales of Unruly Women. She has an MFA from the University of Illinois and has stories, poems, essays, and book reviews published in Witness, Drunken Boat, Fiction Writers Review, the Nervous Breakdown, and other journals.