Brock William Storey
Brock William Storey is a Midwestern poet. He is the recipient of a 2024 and 2025 Academy of American Poets University & College Prize. His work is forthcoming in Southeast Review. For now he lives in Carbondale, IL with his cat Raphael.
Language of Light
Skylar Matthew Allen Maupin, 1997-2019
Tell me death is not a sealed coffin
but secret passages and hidden panels
that unlatch onto the land of the living.
Tell me ghosts are clothespinned to the mist,
are cigarette butts smearing the sky’s ashtray black,
are trains gutting darkness and butchering silence.
Say the body is a bell. Hollow. Only ringing when struck
with the soul’s tongue—and if the soul never dies,
say he’s ringing in the shattered glass glistening
in every gas station and liquor store parking lot.
Leave out his murder. The drug deal gone wrong.
The bullet holes in his chest…
Read me the story of Elijah: chariot-fire,
a whirlwind whittling down the body,
searing bone, carrying him to heaven alive.
Lie. Tell me murder means flesh translated
to the language of light and crater; say the moon
was faceless before tonight. I want to believe
when you say there are frays in the fabric,
places where the earth is unstitched,
sinkholes and folds and caves
where shadows slink hand in hand with the dead.
Though all I see is surface—crust—like an endless plain
hammered flat on the sun’s anvil, my life without him.
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Image by Abhas Jaiswal from Pexels
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