Benjamin Renne: SONNET FOR ALEXANDRIA • Cleaver Magazine

Benjamin Renne
SONNET FOR ALEXANDRIA

1. I caught you staring at that great Midwestern sunset sewn together with photons from the last six months
2. in the hibernation of the moment, beneath blue water towers or stunted trees, the metaphors dried so you sealed them onto flat circlets of pine
………………—for preservation, you said
3. highways ran the length of your spine, the whole suburban vertebrae, your body down in Mokena, and the sky held onto the afternoon snow for so long it made us heretics again
4. where we picked up each others’ breaths and condensed them onto our chins
5. from my stiff beard to your perpendicular hands
6. the ritual persisted
7. uninterrupted by the new routines we made for ourselves or the contrasts against everything that came before
8. in the way your body reassembled itself like a Cubist, forming and reforming fragments in space beside mine
9. …………in the locked screen your reflection
10.………..in the locked screen a spring crown
11. ……………..in the locked screen color became slowly archived
12. ……………..in the locked screen ultra violet rays pulled at your hair
13. ……….and your breast glowed amethyst, shined brightly on a lineless
…………….page stained with lavender, your voice bubbling up
14. …………………….to jump clear and purposeful into the corrugated evening

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Benjamin Renne lives and teaches in the Washington, D. C. area. He reads feverishly in his time off and likes the feeling when a poem or story curls up behind his brain for a few days and just sits there, refusing to budge. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University and his poetry has appeared in Ghost Proposal, SLAB, CatheXis Northwest Press, and more.