Selected Poems

Claire Cella

A Natural
Bridge

I heard once that if you want to let go, you have to
fall in love with the part of you that is holding on.

That is the concession rock makes before it becomes
an arch, a hollow place in a solid body. An echo
within the ribs it makes of itself, feeding

back the sound of us within it, the sound of years
it took to get here, this eventual collapse, this open.

We often try to make things move faster than they want—
which rubs against a building patience in us that stops
and waits, offers a hand to cross cold silver streams.

All daylight we shambled down a wide and gaping
drainage, with walls protecting silt from seasons

and cottonwoods that clung to the creek’s crumbling,
and to the gold of fall. The sun gave up early, barely
cresting the canyon’s lip before it left again. Imagine,

the sun also rests. We had come to see a thing grown
permeable and soft by wind and water. Instead,

we stumbled upon a cluster of wild horses, nibbling
brambles of the not-quite dead, manes stunted,
tails tangled in the same burrs that pricked our skin.

I cannot tell you if they were curious or afraid—
I cannot tell you what we were either. So we watched.

The horses, their bodies, ripple with sweat and
some sensation that drove them to thunder
to a sandy ridge, to look down and back upon us,

breathing, quaking, with wonder.

Claire Cella

Magnetic
North

I fell asleep and woke in a dry
desert dream.

Next to you, the only thing
green was the choya. The sun

crested shoulders, rewound
salt. A curve-billed thrasher

called in morning and I could have
lived in this

bonebaked cirque of grassland,
laid down in this body

of dirt, traced circles until
a nest was worn in the scrub

oak shadow, silent as the milkblue
sky, a slice of moon latched

to the rim, the stars scouring
the night. The seeds of this

like a small scythe, cutting
something open. In dark, we tried

to learn the well-worn shapes
of Cassiopeia and Perseus,
stories of circling, clinging, slaying,
but instead remembered

the podcast about the back
of a bird’s eye, the place

where light gets in, the place
sensitive to Earth

and its magnetic field, the place
of chemical compassing, a gradient

of color when looking north. I felt
myself stop asking,

what is this? Light of some
invisible spectrum buried

in a hollow in my body
saying, just stay.

Claire Cella grew up rambling in the Catskill Mountains before moving west—by way of Austin, Thailand, and a few points in between—to settle in Wyoming where she works as a graphic designer. Her poetry has appeared in Cream City Review, Deep Wild Journal, Pilgrimage, and The Fourth River, among others.