Etheric, accessible, synapse-busting images
Prayers Below Sea Level takes a deep dive into the mind of a modern mystic. Inspired by nature and jolting juxtapositions, Prayers resurfaces with treasures buried in the subconscious.
Portraits of unconventional women inhabit these pages, but don’t call this women’s poetry: its themes of transformation and the innate buoyancy of hope have a universal scope.
AVAILABLE OCTOBER 15, 2018
Gypsy
With a full moon strapped to her back,
she stakes down a flapping corner
of
She gathers tinder from the duff,
ignites it with the sharp note
of a nocturnal hymn.
Too close to the fire
she rises, wingless
like an ember.
She leans back against the darkness
wrapping her shoulders
with thick folds of midnight.
Dreams herself as wild terrain —
that hill is her hip
the sky her mind,
a falling star, the moon she miscarried
seven years ago.
Follow the blush of first light to find her
lacing up restless bones,
inventing a choreography
with the wind
and her best intentions,
shimmering just out of reach.
The Semantics of Molting
When the school bell rang
all the answers
dropped off the chalkboard.
Without warning, our homework wilted,
turning brown at the edges.
Pages from our History book
came loose from their leather binding
in search of a new story.
The teacher panicked.
“F,” he said, but everyone knew everything
was simply incomplete.
At recess, we caught the principal lying,
his spine flat on the green grass,
arms spread like an open book.
After lunch, the last sentence
split lengthwise along the predicate,
like a seedpod exposing the etymology of ideas
we had no names for.
We took turns after school
holding each word
up to the light.
Between cracks in the old vocabulary
we could see movement, a stirring
under a thin membrane of language.
LUXURIOUS AND FIERCE
“Vulnerable, luxurious as velvet, fierce by comparison, but it is a welcome fierceness. “ – Fiona Eustathiades, Dublin Writers’ Group
OBSESSIVE
“Mears is persistent, keeps working it over like an old dog with a tattered wool sock. “ – Nancy Walbeck, Anacortes American
KILLING IT
In “Prayers Below Sea Level,” Constance Mears “hauls in a killing of wild Helvetica.”