There Are Ways to Measure Magic - Miriam Calleja
poem read by
There Are Ways to Measure Magic
Miriam Calleja
You invite poets to a dark wood.
You hold my hand and let me position
and reposition is as I like it.
Under my breath, I hum again,
think of other ghostly women who have guided me before,
stood next to my attempts to stop.
There is a constant falling in me:
a need to set the settled on fire.
Deer huff on the other side of the river.
We sigh to keep them from dashing.
We catch the lights but not quite,
passing from a delicate grasp to the next,
each reaching up—
until the tallest lets go of a star;
that’s the highest the blue ghost has been
in its life, escaping fear. But we are not here
to kill. We drop first lines, bleeding titles
from our next poem, but the tenderness
is on our skin, it is caught
in the chemical reaction. A textbook
says that perhaps nobody knows,
that it is related to the reaction with oxygen—
doesn’t explain the nitty-gritty.
We want to see the light;
no need to understand where it comes from.
Miriam Calleja is an award-winning poet, artist, workshop leader, and translator. Her work has appeared or is
forthcoming in Arkansas Review, Taos Journal, Plume, humana obscura, and elsewhere.
https://www.instagram.com/miriamcalleja/
