tanner x
What I don’t understand is your view of violence.
How two lives could be bound without pain.
When the sun cracks open the night
like a beaten eggshell, what other name
could you give? Was it forgotten, somehow?
The length of love like cord between
the winter elk and starving wolf?
Would Christ have loved
so deeply without the cross?
Gandhi, his hunger? Dr. King
this broken husk of an empire?
What is love but pain filtered through the eyes
of God? So when I touch you, and you pull
away closer
it’s as if a sea has been parted, the first
foot set down. As if
we were the people being freed, pulled
through a sleeve of suffering
towards release, tight and dangerous
as the water on both sides, threatening
to break
***
Tanner X is a student currently enrolled in Georgia College and State University, working towards an English major. He has had work published in Penultimate Peanut, SHARE, Evocations Review, Unlimited Literature, Porch Critters and The Peacocks Feet, as well as receiving the Academy of American Poets’ Student Poetry Prize for my poem “The Wind Gatherer.”