My Blue Peninsula

By Kristen Keckler
after Joseph Cornell & Emily Dickinson

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The sky is a bucket
of lapis lazuli pigment
tipped
onto a stretched canvas
through the window
of my simple room,
framed by bleached wood
and mesh-square
shutters
that offer me and bees
a reprieve from
the world’s gaze.

After you visit from
your own box,
I don’t perish
from bliss and delight—
I feel fortified
by my technicolored
daydreams
in flesh,
dopamine coasting
swift currents.

Then weeks of bleeding
sunsets,
and memories
prickle like grass burrs
picked up
while gardening,
ready to collapse
at a soft touch.

To tame my brain’s
electric filaments
I scrawl doting notes
carried by messenger
pigeons, launching
my songs into sauntering clouds.
I linger in the warm
bath of you until
it grows shivery,
attempt to gently
shake you out
like fine white sand
from a towel.

I would, no doubt,
be lonelier
without the loneliness
that clutches my chest with
a funk that sometimes
only sunlight can evaporate—
or busy hands
in a patch of peonies.

If the space between
two lovers
is as immense as
a keening ocean,
hope is the finger
of Italy summoning
empty lungs to fill again.
Between our pages
I press the downy feather
you once left
on my doorstep,
waiting for your return
envelope.

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Kristen Keckler teaches creative writing at Mercy University in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Her work has appeared in L’Esprit Literary Review, The Argyle, The Collidescope, The Iowa Review, Vestal Review, Free State Review, and other journals. She can be found rummaging around garage sales and thrift stores, on the lookout for unexpected treasures. “My Blue Peninsula” was inspired by the Joseph Cornell shadow box that was, in turn, inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem #405.