Back to Issue 4

Instar by John Harper

Speaking it, a thousand pieces
Climb through my distant eyes -

Innocence would end at its turn,
Falling out of every pretended life,
Of whose each startled face
May have been I -

As if it were but to be
An easy brightness rising in,
So as I'd cease

What I've hugely tried
To impossibly complete
An endless, endless sky.

In whatever way
Had been taken
For the unknown,
I might notice
How silence dissolved
This double head.

Bio: John Harper has had poems published in Cutbank , Mid-American Poetry Review , Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies , The Dickinson Review , amongst other journals.