Poems by Malachi Black
Here Be Monsters
Squinting by candlelight, your blotter flat,
hunched over the earth’s enormous sprawl,
you watched, as by stop-motion, each inset
animate the tidal reach and withdrawal
of sovereign lines: the seepage and the floods
breaching drawn riverbanks, ink spilling
through forests, plains, and farms, bewildering
the stones on streets renamed if not reformed;
under your angled quill and blotting sand,
scrawled empires, scrolled continents, collapsed
as with a grand sweep of the callused hand
of some dark god. Bent above your brittle map,
cartographer, war-withered portraitist,
you wept over each feature of the world.
News of the Flood
First it was a dark fleck in the village
dust, eyes of the animals grown large
with an alarm no one would trust, the barn
door blown in by a wheeling wind, then hail
jackhammering our tin roof, caving it
into a pierced mesh sieve, the seedbeds dropped
in marsh, the roads submerged, a tidal surge
lifting at force the cinderblocks beneath
our cars, our porch buckling like a cardboard
box, brick homes capsized into crackling foam,
the trees’ crowns splintering like shipwreck, sucked
to reef-depth by the counterflow, bodies
hollowed, swollen, severed, torn, deformed—
tortured like syntax by the word of God.
Malachi Black is the author of Indirect Light (Four Way Books, 2024) and Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), the latter a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the PSA’s New American Poets Series (chosen by Ilya Kaminsky). Black is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of San Diego.
Table of Contents for A Formal Feeling