How To Start


I cannot start

without the dagger pain of a wooden splinter

cored deep and burrowing in the dark.

Bearded dog, limping Cuckoo wasp, the painted 

canvases are tumbling dominoes 

but I cannot start. 


Once I wandered onto property that was not mine

and an old man came screaming up 

on a swastika-stamped ATV and the damp moss

spat his beliefs in my eyes, and I was startled

by a mind that was not mine.

I could start then.



Her Body


She lifts her body with her body, 

moves her body with her body, sits down

on a hard mahogany chair that holds her body

while she tends to her body, as it is a creature

that needs be tended. Cutting lentils

and cooking rice to sustain her body,

boiling water, infusing safflower

that will quench her body, her body

moving her fingers (a part of her body)

with fine finesse and ease. She thinks

nothing of this marvelousness

that is her body; her body 

is a sack which carries her brain around

which is also a part of her body, 

wishes she could be without it, contemplates

the necessity of fingernails and earlobes.

She navigates the stairs with her body

that was built by bodies

with the help of machines and tools

that were imagined and designed by bodies, 

who sweated, labored, debated

and shaped them alive like art. She enters

with her body, exits with her body,

works with her body, talks

with her body, embraces with her body,

treats it like a garden bush,

keeping it satisfied in its self-containing self.

Her body is the ultimate instrument,

that could even make other bodies

if she so chose; in her womb,

with her body, and the brief assistance

of another body, she can form a being.

(She does not consider much

how this is an attribute of gods.) 

She lifts her body to reach the books 

on the top shelf, lies her body with her body 

onto her bed that cradles her body, 

an idea her body came up with  

to reconfigure itself. And so

she dreams in her body, 

sees orbs and faces and feels pine needles

and loses time and place and law. 

Her body is a distant echo; for seven hours

she is more than her body and she likes this, 

she thinks this is a miraculous feat.

When she wakes she is a body again. 

She rouses her body, walks her body

to the kitchen with her body,

to the kettle with her body, her body

a marvel, to be sure, her body

a majesty of cells and electrical impulses

and movements of bone and lore.

She counts her dollars, heads

to the grocery store, buys a vegetable body, 

smells it, feels its leathery hide, wonders

if a potato is aware it has a body,

she walks alone the five city blocks 

back home, considering only 

the consciousness of the sky. 





Dead Finches



They say the bird is a messenger. 

Two finches die in a heatwave but who’s around?

The folding and unfolding skies twiddle 

with my heart-ends, my valves summer yellow, 

chambers blanketed in snow. Again 

a lover sends down the rains, but all I get 

are rasping gulls with shrieks that puncture sleeps 

as musky as cow pastures, as heavy as gold.

My messengers are in procession down the nave 

of a church with no one but straw dolls in the pews.

Birds die everyday. I’ve broken bottles 

with more than liquid in them. In mourning

there’s a need for a story (even if cruel). 

Words unwritten are words unused.





The Play




The curtain rises, and there are faux-animals 

human beings dressed in gowns  

of lions, elk, cicadas, foxes, toucans 

whales on their stomachs moaning upon the floor

so they sway, declare they are grass blades 

heaped together, a meadow, a symphony 

and yes, they are singing 

singing with not just their mouths dressed

as maws and bills and proboscises but with their eyes 

their arms, their bellies, their hands 

they are trying to tell the story 

the story of what it means 

to be on an oblate ball of clay alone 

orbiting its way through unrelenting space 

and what it means, they tell, of how they all lean

together upon one another's shoulders 

how they have sex with each other

eat each other 

die and will head

into the same soily, cool bed 

how they fear and love each other 

and are pulled 

arrested

driven by yearnings and cravings 

to rub against, break things open

watch it, see it, touch it, all of it, grow, change 

it all so painful, heavenly, astronomical

so they sing, of when they first realized 

that they could not leave, that they, all as one

existed on an island, and if it goes 

they all go, gulped by an exhalation of energy

dark matter and quantum particles 

and together they begin to act out the end

by suddenly spinning like tops 

they fall into and over each other, calling out

hollering roars and coos and clicks and baas 

and gasps and cries that are human

and taking off their pelts, as humans 

they collapse, impact, all as one, to the stage



except the whales, they merely roll onto their backs 

and reach their flippers up toward 

the lights shining above, and this theater 

all the way to the back rows and utmost rafters 

is silent as a tomb.      





Shake



All things rattle to your touch.

You are an earthquake, with feelers for the moon. 

Monsignori pray for you. Playwrights scratch out 

the tremor that takes place inside your pen;

little things make you quiver,

like lost daughters, dead pets, gone friends. 

As the mother hen you bear the egg.

As the second youngest of the Babe and the Pop

your shoulders shake from all the wave of 

Seven Sibling Wonders who came. 

You stick to shampoo, like glue, 

and all the windows leak whispers to you.

You pluck a cigarette, and shiver in the drag.

As the grass whipping, you smile.

The dandelions sprout in droves 

and you reach to uproot—but you don’t.

Mama, you get me to commit 

the genocide.





Lime Kiln



Around his steeple, a neckerchief

embroidered with the lie his father gave. 

So, around the point, the strong gulls live,

songs like raking nails to the ear. 

Dry myrtle, in the hand, spittle

aside the mouth, we forge course 

through the arching buttresses of stars. 

He knows the hammer. He knows the bouts.

What swings lays waste to things unmoving.

I reject his common beliefs, his white napkin

that dabs away the gore of his stinging words. 

Daytime the chronometer, daytime the stick

measuring the waves at Lime Kiln.

My hands cross the hours. My hands 

silt smeared and boney old. He harbors

his clean justice, his pure head

in the flailing wings of birds thriving.

I see the dead ones, on the stones.

Full of ivory threads and matted plumes. 

Renwick Berchild is half literary critic, half poet. She is lead editor of Green Lion Journal and writes at Nothing in Particular Book Review. Her poems have appeared in Porridge Mag,Headline Press, Whimperbang, Free Verse Revolution, Vita Brevis, Streetcake, and other e-zines, anthologies, and journals. She was born and raised on the angry shores of Lake Superior, and now lives in a micro-apartment in Seattle, WA. Find more of her work at www.renwickberchild.com