Lynn Thayer
HAMLET
I wake to silence. Fall asleep to silence. But the day is busted
with fragmentary sounds, a reminder of the living & their
sirens, call-back voices, shrill with delight & defeat.
Interruption grows like a hamlet without worship.
Once a steady sleep, the brain breaks its promise
& quakes, cracks a rich landscape to nightmare.
In between the days of night & decaying fields,
between moments of solstice, moments of balance
a dream encroaches on a tangled village, obscures security.
I settled here for knowledge, for harvest’s wheaten fingers
& the bounty of sea’s brethren down river, a silt of shell
returning to feed creatures who feed me faith & fair health.
But today I’m starved for bread, bones sever at the joints
a nightmare of broken land too sodden to produce repose
CAESURA
weeping continues
through day, night, into day again
only soil & branch & oil
to kindle tendon, tissue.
Uneasy friction / uneasy salt
pressure mountains into ash
veneration to stillness
map the yip & howl of mouths
to their sinew counterparts.
For what rest;
sound or seconds
could bring spectrum back
to a body’s interrupted dawn?
VIPER
as a cornered viper
but my venom’s
all dried up.
I tell my husband
a couch is just an upright bed
like I’m a philosopher
of recovery;
the Sartre of silence
the Beauvoir of stillness
but really I’m subordinate
to my body, the spell & chaos
of her rage,
determined as wildfire
hot as a neurotoxin
in the pyre of my blood
made of matchstick & tinder
& I can’t stay upright in her wake.
Tonight I’m too tired
for the final resurrection;
I’ll rest my forked tongue
& sleep wherever dreams may hold me
—
Lynn Thayer is a multidisciplinary artist living with chronic disability in Salida, CO. Her work has appeared in Wild Roof Journal, The Closed Eye Open and is forthcoming in ‘Obscura Craft Magazine’. Lynn was selected for the 2024-2025 Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop Poetry Collective manuscript cohort where she is working to complete her first manuscript. See more of her work at www.lynnthayer.com.