AFTER BEI DAO / AFTER JEAN VALENTINE

The skin of your deity smells like gasoline

Your prayers are added to the pyre  

A gold wheel spinning  

Once your voice broke out in a sweat   

Each word a salt lick  

There are fingers rooting inside a violin  

Orchestral maneuvers  

In the middle of the pandemic  

You mistook a group of ghosts for an orchard  

You, coward  

Fingers are rooting inside a violin to pull out  

The last scraps of birdsong  

A gold wheel spinning in your mind 

Like insomnia

EDUARDO C. CORRAL's poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Jubilat, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. His work has been honored with a "Discovery"/The Nation award and residencies from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Slow Lightning, his first book of poems, was selected by Carl Phillips as the 2011 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. He is a recipient of a 2011 Whiting Writers' Award.

Devil's Lake is published twice annually at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Contact us by emailing an editor or our webmaster. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook. Helen C. White Suite 6195, 600 North Park Street, Madison WI 53706. About our image. ISSN 2156-5821.