Ode to the Light
stalks of grass have swallowed
all there is of green
and sing it
we have names for each plant
whisper plantain
and oatstraw
lupen
an ode to light
the way light enters surfaces
clay, paint, water, skin
and shines back at itself
I found a four-leaf clover once
and you saved it
like you saved the sound of my
small voice,
the day we spent in the park
smiling for no reason
last night I watched a movie,
a man spent his life
making sushi
the streets of Tokyo in snow
dedicate your life to the elevation
of your craft he said
I thought of your canvasses,
rolled in the corners of every room
and watched light
from the screen
play on the faces of the audience
every person suddenly
a small sun
Aurora Brackett lives in Las Vegas, Nevada where she is a PhD fellow in fiction at University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Black Mountain Institute.
She is a recipient of the 2013 Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Literary Excellence, the San Francisco Browning Society’s Dramatic Monologue Award, the Wilner Award for Short Fiction, a nominee for The Pushcart Prize and a 2013 Sozopol Fiction Seminar Fellow. Her work has appeared or will be appearing in Thrush Poetry Journal, Nimrod Quarterly, Eleven Eleven, The Portland Review, Fourteen Hills, and Glimmer Train. She is currently fiction editor of Witness Magazine and was an associate editor of Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives published by Voice of Witness/McSweeney’s in 2010.