Gnaomi Siemens
Summer 2023 | Poetry
Sonnet for Transmutation
Pack up, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk.
Hand wash the coven-wear on permanent press.
A mysterious non luminous substance?
Leitmotif: stank-log. Scrub those stains real good.
Never trust a spiritual leader who
can’t dance. An interglacial period, a relic
found containing the mass of ten million stars,
garlic mustard soaking in grain alcohol.
Be new to us, be young! She wants to move on.
She only wants to chew her tobacco once,
cuz, in the age of chaos, the grass is blue.
Put the body on the tower to clean house,
know how to pack a witch’s kitchen. K, bye!
You are my karmic reason to close this app.
Gnaomi Siemens is a poet and translator based in New York City. Her work can be found at Asymptote, Words Without Borders, The Believer, Slice Magazine, Portland Review, The American Journal of Poetry, The Scores (UK), and Cold Mountain Review, among others in the US and abroad. She has read her translations at The British Library’s Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition in London, was selected by The Poetry Society of New York for a residency at the iconic Mid-Manhattan branch of The New York Public Library, and was a 2019 ALTA Travel Fellow. Her manuscript, The Errant, was a 2020 finalist for The X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize.
Gnaomi recommends All Roads Lead To Blood by Bonnie Chau and the new Taschen book, Witchcraft. As well as all of Brian Greene's books on quantum physics, the cosmos, and hidden dimensions.