The Showbear Family Circus

Author: Emma Karnes

  • Ether

    Ether

    I go with my wings to the edge of the earth, I deliberate faith and the breaking of eggs. Oh, oh, I moved here against the vacuum of your wanting for love; I’m continentally-far with these wide- swooping crows. You’re the edge of the earth falling away from my toes. You’re the turquoise planes of…

  • Absence

    Absence

    The air conditioner disturbs the birds, the church bells; they think these things are calling to them. Does this mean anything to you, as you mourn this or that, as big rain falls from a blue sky? Probably not in your lifetime will you conceive of such magnanimous panic—searching the white skies over, over for…

  • Art in Heartache

    Art in Heartache

    Of all the many waves curling onward in the river, of all the green things growing upward from the earth, I won’t say I know you, I won’t say I miss you, I won’t say I I I at all in this poem. What space then for the study of the shape of the boats,…

  • Return

    Return

    What kind of pain did you give me, sitting by the harbor, was it a false pain stretched the illusory distance of stars? was it a new pain young enough to be switched with its twin? I went back today, to our wet spot of city grass; I found a mother and her baby counting…

  • You Are Not An Idolatrous Creature of the Earth

    You Are Not An Idolatrous Creature of the Earth

    You Are Not an Idolatrous Creature of the Earth Imperatives Name definitively the body parts of a tree. A possibility becomes possible In becoming distinct. It’s hard to say: Today the sky is the shape of corpse. The collapsible shape of corpse, the perverse absence of the storm coming, feel Your body like a rock…