December 13th: Cori A. Winrock

Bioluminescent Christmas Trees

This greening our night
an unhasping-of. Phosphor

-escent nursery. Glasphalted sky.

The saw-song gleams friction,
cuts its own kind of light.

Strapped to our cars, strung
along roadways. An oceanscape

draped across foyers—the trees,

then, afterglow

on the turned-off curves
of television screens.

: : :

Glitter the gold into each needle
until brightness clutters & spills, tinsels

our eyes. Until sick with halo

we swaddle the dazzle
in burlap sacks like statues

wrapped & hauled, wept

out of our houses
into the nearest unfrozen body of

water—afterimages adrift
in our retinas like flashlillies:

contusions of left-over light. 

Cori A. Winrock’s poems have appeared in (or are waiting in the wings of) Black Warrior Review,  Blackbird, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Barn Owl Review, Pool & others. She is a recipient of a Barbara Deming Individual Artist Grant as well as being chosen as Editor’s Choice for Mid-American Review’s James Wright Poetry Award. Her manuscript was a finalist for the 2010 Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award.