Shepherd’s Hour You’ve been a rusty parking lot for desolation but this hour your night mind calculates sheep bells deep in the belly of the ravine. Your herd wanders through fog in syncopation, their frosty breaths leave behind trails of ellipses. You light another cigarette and stumble down the steep hill of brambles to crouch among their low bleats. Musk of their matted wool drapes you in stillness, stillness you’re prone to making thick with gloom and inertia. But this hour, listen to the steadying of their hooves in high grass, place your hands onto the rippling lilt of their haunches, taste the haunting vapors of hallelujah, so strange to your lips, secret chord ready to release you.
Nikki Santer‘s poems have appeared in various publications including Ms. Magazine, Poetry East, Heavy Feather Review, Slab, Slipstream, [PANK], Crab Orchard Review, RHINO, Grimm, Hotel Amerika and The Main Street Rag. Her work has received many honors including six Pushcart and three Ohioana and Ohio Poet book award nominations as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her twelfth poetry collection, Resurrection Letter: Leonora, Her Tarot, and Me, is a sequence in tribute to the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington and was recently published by the arts press, Cereal Box Studio.
Amethyst Review 