J R Toriseva

Rime

The iced-in waterweed producing oxygen, delusional in February,
the bread that gives the villain power, listening in the pond an iced

blue-green skillet hardened by damp soil, the trance of water, this
is the place that swallowed the stars last night, the place that seizes

tomorrow’s bursts and holds them in reserve the place where today
is detained, like a pause between notes, the eaves of the pond shake,

the roof cracks. He is standing between the branches of the dream, snow
falls from his fingers in a baffle of dendrites of branching instability. His

forehead cracks with thunder; this gilded water is where leaves are made.
Deep in the ice lock she walks away from the matted walls, slipping her

foot against the globe, bending the shadow of ice near the rattled reeds,
tattered by frost, twigs bare, the alder cones clatter, the catkin leaks against

her diamond forehead with the soft telekinesis of water. The flat worm,
the larvae, the pond snail entrenched in the deepest part draws her into this

state of self hypnosis, the clairaudience of water, the psychometry of the
situation, the jangle of shaft, the water knitting, the sun cracking the surface

of thought, the twigs tapping at the wind, this the year we submerge, the time
we do the Atlantis. Rushes shed snow and in mythic shift, I want to go with

the pond. I’m better in water, albeit thick mirror distorted in ice, even with
the leaves of the yellow flag iris, even with only leaves and everything brown

and tattered, even only with remnant, I’m clearer when iced, when I do the Atlantis,
when I am larvae-fed. The green and yellow flame browned, I hurt no one in water.

J. R. Toriseva works for Literary Arts in Canada, reads manuscripts for Tin House and has been awarded a working scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Mary Merritt Henry Prize in Poetry. Work is in or forthcoming from Descant, Fulcrum, The Fiddlehead, CV2, Prism International, Nimrod, and Soundings East. “Dandelion Rites” is in the 2008 anthology DAYS I MOVED THROUGH ORDINARY SOUND published by San Francisco’s City Lights.