Susan Sonde’s most recent poem to appear here was “Gluttony” (November 2018). 

Roll Call
By Susan Sonde

Someone is sharpening the ice. Someone is nipping at the cold.
Your lateral pull, your medial arc—torque-variables: emotions,
feel-goods, addictions—that which beds in the house of the
hippocampus—would you be willing to call upon it and give it
to an adder, its tongue flicking against the sky’s blue repast, a
body made big so it can sunbathe? Would you be willing to share
the creamy white pallor of your scone with one whose lips are
already dusted with confection?

Someone is walking on heated metal. Someone else is inciting
trees to riot. Who’s that squaring off beneath fig leaves, hiding
his nakedness under his tongue? Do the Gods abhor river rats?
Who fortifies clouds—ferries gnats on their life rafts, their
pillows of air? Have the Gods been addressing you lately in
monosyllables?

Someone is looking for converts. Someone is dining on marrow.
Would you be willing to call upon your rib which floats in the
meat of your body—your permanent liability and give it to

The Society of Wanton Angels, those roughing up the minions,
maximizing mistrust—warring with the factions—deregulating
the firmament? Christ or Chaos—who’s responsible for vagrants?
Who hugs the night shift—throngs to meetings, calls the roll—beats
the drums and retreats to high ground in the middle of a handshake—
the charred hills of a long ago targeted by the throwers of flame?

Was heaven conceived with a knife?

This poem was dreamt into being, was suckled but not weaned
from river and waterfall. Therefore, it embraces only the shape
of its desires: has hubris, ambition, appetite. It’s appetite is
bottomless, in-collusion-with those hair brained visions of an
afterlife, of continuance in perpetuity.

Are unborn cemeteries accessible?

Someone is rifling the moss. Someone else is barely scratching
the surface and finds a heart anyway—one that photosynaptic
measures have blackened. Who’ll palpate it? Syncopation.
Malnutrition. Stress on the weak beat. The note unheard, the
words unspoken: that carefully constructed, worn out wind-up
clock tossed onto the unheedful junk heap.

Something comes that calls itself sister to the night. Something
equivocates. Something else wants to interject—injecting into
itself this text. Do you deepen with that? Do you harken? Are
you in the mood for—reflective, subjective; schizophrenic? Which
embraces your collective you? Something is shouting out from its
half space, from the hyper-plane. Something is caught in a muddle.

The watch is warm, the muse lacking. Night rules the gate.