Tertullian's Daughter | Kirsty Singer

Kirsty Singer is a desert-dwelling poet, teacher, editor and scholar with a past life in public health. Her poetry can be seen at PENAmerica and H_NGM_N, and heard at Jupiter88 and at the Machine Project Mystery Theatre Poetry Archives. Tertullian’s Daughter is her first chapbook.   Awash among the twisted dark shapes in the dusk-lightI need a trowel (I hear an owl)to dig a better hole. How many flowers have to die to deposit this small fistula in good earth?gold cylinders littered about, bent to the indeterminate will (their plastic shellsthis morning invented mumblecore “rocking and hooting to scare us away”this is what matters: shadow trainmoving across the land, peeling out—what kind of gap opens up in sand—the spine pricksto have hoarded the meaning of light (more thanaverage bad) the point was warmth, stupidto see a creature LEAP, LEAP, LEAP— in the margins of and want to shoot“your real dying looks like play dying”whatever in our mouths rinsing sickI have spent my cheap virtigin