(Cool Calm Design Lab/Unsplash)

I’ve met one named Phoenix Jiránek,

ringleted and effusing “contuition”

as gaily as a Franciscan in a boat

eating honeycakes with an angel.

Thus the Lord showed me both ways,

the austere and the hospitable, are good.

This morning I pray, make my food

honeycomb. Let me feed

on names caught out of solitude:

Cronius, Achilles, John the Dwarf.



Sweeten my awkwardness as I morph

into this weird, glad cloud of witnesses.



Let my shortcomings be laid

at my own door.

Danielle Chapman is a poet and essayist. Her collection of poems, Delinquent Palaces, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2015. Her poems have appeared in the Atlantic and the New Yorker, and her essays can be found in the Oxford American and Poetry. She teaches literature and creative writing at Yale.

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