glitter bomb // (disappearance ritual)

and something turns a myth:

in the tree the spinner catches into prismatic light
sealed into a tree the tree aflame 
my mouth       opens pink blossom falling
a kind of legerdemain hand itself   made of light

to catch light to scatter it

a firework made of one’s own ashes   holds a sky-shape      
an incendiary code
      flash bang glitter my heart ticks       like a bomb

and I open a door in the air
a sphere          of gleaming breath   
crystals into mother of pearl clouds 

and ash confettis down in a fire-sky
petals falling
a transient curtain to duck behind a blind
of blue vapor into which I disperse myself particulate 
into something very cold
something summonable to misdirect attention 

I want annihilation
a hummingbird attacking the throat of a flower
its wings  forsaken
as light breaks on water

LISA BICKMORE

Lisa Bickmore is the author of three books of poems. The second, flicker, won the 2014 Antivenom Prize and was published in 2016 by Elixir Press. She won the 2015 Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize for the poem “Eidolon.” She is the founder/publisher of Lightscatter Press (lightscatterpress.org). In 2022, she was named the Poet Laureate for the state of Utah and in 2023 received a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets for her Poet Laureate project, moonintheryepress.org.