Ghost Fires

poems by

Lindsay Rockwell

~72 pages, $14 (+ shipping)

Release Date:  May 2, 2023

The Advance Sale Discount for this title has expired. For those who prefer to pay by check, the price is $18/book (which includes shipping) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, PO BOX 690100, Charlotte, NC 28227-7001. 

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Lindsay Rockwell is poet-in-residence for the Episcopal Church of Connecticut and hosts their Poetry and Social Justice Dialogue series. She’s published in CALYX, Gargoyle, Radar, River Heron Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, among others. She has received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and Straw Dogs Writers Guild/Edith Wharton’s The Mount residency. Lindsay holds a Master of Dance from New York University’s Tisch School of Arts and is an oncologist.

Lindsay Rockwell does not just write poetry, she creates environments. As she writes, “worlds are being born.” Her use of sound and inventive language infuses her lines with a wild lusciousness of emotion. These are poems not to grasp with the intellect as much as to enter “like a bowl of sky.” ~ Michael Favala Goldman, Award-winning Poet and Translator

In poems both diaphanous and muscled, Lindsay Rockwell gives body and voice to the ineffable, a world of “quiet collide,” where ghost fires flare and we long both to “backward fall” and “forward lean,” where “we are all versions of a fortress” and “holding is not an option”—but also where “lifting to the light is the birthright of being.” From start to finish, along with the poet, I find it “impossible not to gasp.” ~Ellen Doré Watson

Ghost Fire

There are ashes everywhere.
Driftwood. Grasslands. Bone.

Shadows of moon and metal. Tides.
How questions wobble. Artists flinch.

And walls pardon the noise of breath.
Hurrying. Delicate. How spectacular

blood. Morning. Mouthfuls
of blossom gone. Air hauls

the heavy scent of sorrow. Slouching.
Eye of fire’s a gone tomorrow.

Letters. Envelopes. A clock face. Wicked, ticking
in the corner. A whisper redefining decibel.

A child’s cry through thin walls. A mother’s comfort.
Mumblings. Plans to travel. Wheels. Wheels.

The Shape of You

When you came in from the frozen rain
I wanted to lick your face, your skinsuit.
Wrap you in warm silk
the color of wounds long healed.

When you thrummed inside
the grand piano’s husk, lost to her
black and white ivory kisses,
my eyes unshut themselves.

When you howled songs, shimmering
your stalwart, never
had a murmuration arced so sad,
so day and so right the rain just fell.

You arrived that spark of an eve
as fireflies flickered morse code.
Your sinew and magic—
the shape of calculus, strut and sky.

Rage

She carries her rage in a glass bottle
rage the color of blood, night—
the shape of heat, wood, steel.

It has a name she cannot say.
It hushes her like rain, like sleep,
so, I carry her rage in a glass bottle.

On horseback, riding scared, we gallop,
our alchemy of dreams sculpts the sky—
dreams the shape of heat, wood, steel.

Heat blows the glass, thunder pounds the steel,
wind whittles wood beneath time’s aching arc
and we carry her rage in a glass bottle.

Some nights I watch the blood
work the bottleneck open, remember
her wrist unkindly carved, her

thighs, thorax, scapula— lie
hushed, barely breathing, so yes—
we carry her rage in a glass bottle
rage the color of blood, night.

My Brown Paper Bag

I hold a pen
a brown paper bag
and a bowl of cereal

dressed with peaches
the color of love
and impossible—

a recording
of my mother’s voice
spills

I love you like a fire
she died
at the hand of her surgeon

whose gentle face
folds into the creases
of my brown paper bag