Karen Elizabeth Bishop
IRIS
more of me is your body than i know, iris,
doomed flame, bright eye, lip. at night i
hear you speaking in tongues, in syllables
of violet & gold, leaf fricatives, ( ) ( ) ( ).
as if you understood that by morning you
will turn lunatic, limbs wild, ear upon the
hook, screamlike, unblinking, breastflesh.
that speech will soon escape you, like a
small rabbit or like a moon, that the words
won’t form where lips begin, but at the root,
radical, drinking, promised, silent, drunk.
KAREN ELIZABETH BISHOP is a UK/US poet, translator, and scholar. She is the author of the deering hour (Ornithopter Press, 2021) and has work in Lana Turner, New Writing Scotland, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Poetry Northwest. She teaches at Rutgers University, and divides her time between the wilds of New Jersey and Sevilla, Spain.
ISSUE TWELVE features poetry by Samuel Amadon, Rennie Ament, Bruce Beasley, Brittany Cavallaro, Lidija Dimkovska, Denise Duhamel, Alexandria Hall, Rebecca Hazelton, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Kim Hyesoon, Gilad Jaffe, Michael Klein, Peter LaBerge, Nick Lantz, Eugenia Leigh, Robert Wood Lynn, Lisa Olstein, Eric Pankey, Tomaž Šalamun, Elizabeth Scanlon, Nathan Spoon, Sampson Starkweather, Peter Streckfus, Rodrigo Toscano, Stella Wong, and Felicia Zamora; fiction by Marie-Helene Bertino, Emily Neuberger, and Ed Taylor; nonfiction by Kate Colby, Krystal Languell, Kathryn Nuernberger, and J. M. Tyree; a film essay by Zack Finch; and Prageeta Sharma in conversation with Michael Dumanis.