Kika Dorsey
Kika Dorsey is an author in Boulder, Colorado. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature and her books include the poetry collections Beside Herself, Rust, Coming Up for Air, Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger, which won the Colorado Authors’ League Award for best poetry collection, and the novel As Joan Approaches Infinity. She has been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize and for Best of Net. Currently, she is a lecturer at the University of Colorado in literature and creative writing. In her free time she swims miles in pools and runs and hikes in the open space of Colorado’s mountains and plains.
The New Year
I’ve templed my body, chiseled its edifice with gargoyles
of monkey-ears like stone fans, filled it with votary candles
and naves like the alcoves of fingers reaching
toward an angel-promise, my ribs like pews,
my heart the altar where I burn frankincense for you.
My body was once a gathering of the coven of passion
before vanity, women weaving themselves, circling around
its flame, the cells multiplying and dying at the same time.
Some became my bone, my skin. Some returned to the fire.
New Years knew empires, wars, revolutions. They picked me up
from the slopes of riverbanks. They told me of new beginnings.
They nailed down the old year. I sweated with their effort,
time like a refugee crossing borders. I promised you if your heat
made me sweat, my empathy would still be able to see the difference
between us or the splayed stone hands of the gargoyle and the virgin’s
wrapped around the body of an infant who never asked to be born,
nevertheless so holy. When I templed my body, the blanket of my
eyelids promised me the dark. I promised you light. Prayers divided,
multiplied. My feet treaded on broken ground for another kind of temple.
The city flooded with birds and the river parted, oars pressing it
for answers, and the choir sang in the apse while the pagans fled
like my hair in the wind, and nothing would ever be the same.
