in parentheses

Owen Yingling is a first-year student at the University of Chicago. He is originally from Arlington, Virginia. He does not have much to say about himself but he would like to hit the specified bio word count for this magazine of 50 words so he must stretch it out.

---

Blue Mountain

Perhaps a little risk
To play God in those high places
Is worth the price of my confession carved out upon
Rocks strewn about the empty white

For it is not such a bad fate
Churned upon grounds softer than you and me
Tumbling like a child on a grassy knoll
As the winds offer the relief of a servant comforting a dying prince
Who knows he will never place the crown on his youthful brow

I know their hands groped for cords they did not find
Full bellies and grinning faces etched into those blind eyes
Tell me when they are borne up upon a stage
The maw cracked, and the deeps emptied of their twilight
Before our faces become like rubies and we give up our dead

I can feel the earth move and can hear its call
But of what use is what it says
I know what lies in the ground beneath me and what waits in morning above
But what will claim me?

Broken Vase

Along the edge of the broken piece, I see dances
Of spectral white against the remanded day
Caught in the sight of ringing bells and laughing spells
Whose gaze deserves not my empty vitality
Or brutal ribaldry whose implications I dare not think
While it lays there so peaceful and still
Leaving my shame unmentioned for now
Until it springs up in the face of the accuser
Pointing towards putrescent fleshy ruin
Towards which the stony rubble dares not look
But I know not of what it knows or thinks
Beyond that all too familiar voice where I rest my heart
I pray that it is sharp enough to cut
A chunk of that rhythmic tone I can feel
Exciting the figures in the dust and the powdered life
That draws near and rescinds, teasing like an alien tide
Before it disappears and melts into an angel’s tears
Revealing the lines and edges mean nothing now and never will

Bargain

The fading impression of a touch
Caught in portraits lined in silk and opal
Leaves ajar a door to muddy wastes
And the empty places you take me

There is a sculpture bound on the aging table
Where I look to in my despair
And when I look, I know it can see
The place among the milky waters hiding
The light of your sinking face from my gaze

In the chill of night’s cool air I feel the taunt
The gesture of a sullen creditor speckled with white
Hunched by swaying cattails cold and wet
To claim my price among the fires for
Your fingers against my skin forever

---