George David Clark
Kaleidoscope
Light, break my eye
already fractured by
desire, already
splintered into squints
and silvers as it’s
raked along a thigh,
already only slivers
of the wince
inside my smile. Light,
spit in dust, apply
the mud into my sight,
and cake me blind
enough to witness
all a pupil hides.
Light, shake the iris
out my eye; remind
me it’s a guise.
And as a forehand pins
a fly’s against the window—
every lens
brought flat before
a broad white sky, amended
from distraction
to a final splendid
sigh—Light, ache
my eye past all pretense
until its lies rinse
out and I transcend it.
George David Clark reads “Kaleidoscope”
George David Clark’s Reveille (Arkansas) received the 2015 Miller Williams Prize and his recent poems can be found in AGNI, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ecotone, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. The editor of 32 Poems, he teaches creative writing at Washington and Jefferson College and lives in western Pennsylvania with his wife and their four young children.