The Art of Making by Alexis Orgera
Associate poetry editor Sally Geiger on today’s bonus poem: Alexis Orgera’s “The Art of Making” rides frantic waves of associative logic, resolving itself with crisp imagery that twangs like the sexy ditties the poem attends to. Orgera packs time and what it means to be an animal into the filament of a lightbulb; this music celebrates new life and we totally need it!
The Art of Making
In 3100 B.C. a woman shows up on a carving
playing a stick lute that grows belladonna in its wings,
strings glowering in morning’s topography. Sexy thing tuned
in perfect fifths, mothwing that plucks a bluegrass ditty
on a lightbulb, glass tinkling in a silent restaurant, the sound
of the Bo tree in a breeze keeping the family rhythm.
My pregnant friend marvels, I feel like part of a species
for the first time, the animal dance of the thing inside her,
baby of the carved top: flat-backed, plectrum-plucked,
born ancestor, born to ancestor, bank of bricks making
a wall, the echolocation of two bats in a canyon,
roots entwined, voices lifting up & up all the way to Jupiter.
The ancients believed in cosmic harmony: the only difference
between heaven & earth is the absence of a perfect sound.
Alexis Orgera is the author of two poetry collections, How Like Foreign Objects and Dust Jacket, and a forthcoming memoir-in-fragments, Head Case: My Father, Alzheimer’s, and Other Brainstorms (Kore Press 2021). Recent or forthcoming poems can be found in Bennington Review, Chattahoochee Review, Conduit, Hotel Amerika, New South, Third Coast, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She a freelance editor and co-founder of Penny Candy Books and Penelope Editions, an indie picture book press and young adult imprint that encourage big conversations and reflect diverse realities and imaginations. In addition to wordplay, she makes visual art, wanders, and studies/practices the art of growing plants for food, medicine, and connection. More at alexisorgera.com.
