The Key Word

Poetry by Lake Angela & Georg Amsel

The field prepares for the night by burying itself in silk hay. You warned the campanologist that melding the bells from flesh is dangerous. Even more so is the key word—the word made hazardous in the spill, the dam for the small hole in the head released. Now green legends meet you in your morning in the mirror. You brush your wild birth from your hair; two oceans fall from your eyelashes and crash into the porcelain sink. You cross yourself, but there is no protection from last century’s storm. Glass nails begin to rain. You take shelter in your shower where coyote looks you in your yellow eye. You stay this way for an eight-hour silence. The wet glass turns black. When you go out, it is just the wind wearing your hat. People believe you are
still alive; no one looks you in the eye.

Georg Amsel and Lake Angela are artists who collaborate across spacetime in both poetry and dancetheatre. Amsel comes from Salzburg and conceives poetic ideas in an Austrian German from the late 1800s. Angela holds a PhD in the intersemiotic translation of poetry and dance from the University of Texas at Dallas and has her MFA in poetry. Her books include Organblooms and Words for the Dead (FutureCycle Press). Previous publications by Amsel and Angela appear most recently in Passages North, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Fourth River, Portland Review, and Cordite Poetry Review. Their work also advocates for neurodivergence and schizophrenia spectrum creativity.