—Emily Dickinson

a hexa-cento (a 6 stanza prose poem cento
where all stanzas contain phrases from the
same poet)

Outside Starbucks’ plate glass window, I catch sight of
Emily in the summer sunlight of nostalgia. Garbed in a
green-fog sleeveless gown, smoking a clove cigarette. Her
fingers nearly gossamer, flipping closed a cloisonne lighter,
the possible’s slow fuse. Ashes denote the Fire was. Truth is
so rare, it is delightful to tell it.

Inside the chill café air, sipping a too hot chai, I try to
assuage my nerves, ceremonious as tombs. What could an
admiring bog say to the famous poet, something about fly
buzz or feathers? Every encounter is opportunity for
obscurity, a ribbon at a time. The ruin is within. Forever  
is composed of Nows  

Starstruck at Starbucks, my clumsy hands quiver, the left one
a Frigate like a book, the right, a page of prancing Poetry. I
could tell Emily, I’m nobody, too, and it is true. But tell it
slant or she shan’t have patience with my nonce rhymes. An
ear can break a human heart   As quickly as a spear.

No one will hear my lines of poetry a hundred thirty nine
years after I’ve passed the Fields of Grazing Grain. Does
Emily know her quest for prosaic language was not in vain?
How we adore her plain but angular verse? Her brain wider
than the sky? Oh, let me be a can girl instead fangirl from
afar. A wounded dear leaps the highest.

I rise, pass through the door ajar that oceans are. Emily’s
there no more. Since then ‘tis centuries. What remains one
clover, and a bee. And of course, my revery. Seattle’s a
prairie. I grow accustomed to the Dark  like before before.
A winged spark doth soar. Dying is a wild night and a new
road. A borrowed name. Fame is a fickle food upon a
shifting plate.

I’m out with lanterns looking for myself.