National Poetry Month : Kendra Sullivan,

 

my calvaria 

aka my skull cap and the swampy
leftover depression where my soft
spot still dimples and wrinkles
the crown of my head where a strip
of firm skin forms a sunken bridge
spanning the hairs width
between two unsutured plates.
The thin, curved cranial bones
vault mind like antimodernist
transepts in a hillside castle’s
honeycombed mead hall:
sweet, the passage of pleasure
from peace-maker to pitcher,
from maiden to midden.

Overhead rooves rot and air
veils are increasingly an architectural
feature of the old house: over time
a trepanation
hole in the mound where the rain
washes the warriors’ brains
off the hem-
lock benches smeared
with blood–
grudge. I am grateful
to the woman who laments the end
of peace when Beowulf
sleeps beyond threat
of waking on his water bed–

burning through wood, gold, flesh
and bone with a view of the sky
dome from his horizontal throne. 
She shares his fate but has no say
in it.
      How loss of “say” and birth
of “song” coincide in the lungs’
folded lobes, full of oxygen
to fuel the funeral pyre. Half Anglo
half Saxon, half Pagan
half Christian, half human
half humus, an unknown
woman. Her present is
downstream. Her future is
downstream. The past is, of course,
the current.
All her life, carried by
temporary diplomacies between warring
tribes wrought in wives
as gifts and golden wreaths and sons
as blood ties or tithes or tides that ran end times
through rinse cycles. The apocalypse was always
now. New
subjectivities rise
from razed empires: “the place
where crying begins” is “territory”
reborn as earth; “manmade” re-
turning to dirt, the material
that made “man.”       
  Whoever said
peace is more than the absence
of war was right. 

 

 

Kendra Sullivan is a public artist, an activist scholar, and a poet. She is Director of the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she co-directs the NYC Climate Justice Hub. She is the publisher of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative and the co-editorial director of Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is the co-founder of the Sunview Luncheonette, a cooperative arts venue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn; and a member of Mare Liberum, an eco-art collective. Her books include Zero Point Dream Poems (Doublecross Press) and Reps (Ugly Duckling Presse). Her research and advocacy advance public scholarship in graduate education from a justice-forward framework.