Christine Boyka Kluge: Two Poems
Fog on Her Tongue | Testing the Wind

Fog on Her Tongue

Silver to the waist, fog on her tongue,
Venus waits for him.
She is no longer young.
She has forfeited eternity
for gravity's anchor.
The waves' intimate salt
finds the wounds in her human form.
Wind carries the noisy swell
of buoy-clang and mortal voices.
Against her grasp,
the empty shell tugs seaward.
She hesitates, caught in the glare
of the shore's painful stare:
granite cliffs, turret windows, iron gates.
Sunblind, soles torn
by barnacle-brailled rocks,
she turns back.
She'd rather drift alone
in her scalloped raft,
buoyant,
the sea's tender fingers
at the small of her back.

Testing the Wind

Words circle the world
with their vaporous bodies,
mistaken for fog or factory smoke.
They trail their hems like clouds
over sleeping roofs and scalps,
whispering.
Sometimes, sensing your yearning,
they pause and press their cottony faces
to windowpane or keyhole,
moving their lips.
Go outside where you can hear them.
Lift your forefinger to test the wind.
Collect them in your fingerprints
like rain in a furrowed field.
Something will grow.

Poet's Biography:

Christine Boyka Kluge is a poet and a visual artist. Her first book of poetry, Teaching Bones to Fly, will be published by Bitter Oleander Press in 2003. Her work has received seven Pushcart Prize nominations, and was given the 1999 Frances Locke Poetry Award by The Bitter Oleander, where she was the featured author in Fall 2001. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in No Boundaries, Prose Poems by 24 American Poets, an anthology from Tupelo Press edited by Ray Gonzalez (due 2003); in Sudden Stories: A Mammoth Anthology of Miniscule Fiction (due 2003 from Mammoth Books, edited by Dinty W. Moore); Arts & Letters; Kestrel; Luna; Natural Bridge; New Millennium Writings; Petroglyph; Poet Lore; Quarter After Eight; Quarterly West; Rattapallax; Red Rock Review; Tar River Poetry; and others.  Online, her work may be found at The Adirondack Review, The Diagram, DMQ Review, and In Posse Review, and in an upcoming issue of Atomicpetals.