Lisa Compo

Stereoscope: Disembodied Sonnet

Craving touch, I watch people hunt                                          ghosts. Allow me to make a tapestry 
where I am the hazel tree. The stag possessed—              buried beneath me. I admit I am 
of a long-evolved line of moths, touching my body        through glass, the paper of my spine 
arched, light. When I’m dead I’ll be                                          fluent in frequency. Everything will become 
architecture. Walls and thresholds                                            gentle, deep— I won’t know which is skin,
tenor or bone. I lived in a house                                                   barely haunted. A spirit who wandered the yard
but never went inside. Barren with desert,                            body a milky scorpion husk under the sun, 
moving from one end of the weary blue day                        up to its dusked edge. I was waiting for permission, 
to palm and pool and appear                                                        suddenly myself again. Monsoonal toads hit doors
like hail. The hummingbirds stunned                                      still. We used blacklight, counted night 
crawlers, their skeletons constellating                                    mineral into cosmos. I don’t care at all— 
how we spoke to each other then. Printing fingers,          stubbled leg hair manifests, knees
wrapped, hip bone cradled— I’ll walk out                            into the night vision lens as air. The mumbled
ultraviolet: try to remember our form— lip fuzzing        air against tips of ears. The hollow beneath neck.

Lisa Compo is an MFA candidate at UNC - Greensboro. She has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: Rhino, Puerto del Sol, Cimarron Review, Sugar House Review, and elsewhere.