Frame
In the underworld, I expect
no further breathing.
No air, no tension.
Why would I fear it?
Look around. Wind combs
garish pollen from fields,
the body’s narrow altar
given nothing,
then given much.
In the underworld, fruition
will not matter.
Religion will whisper like
a distant pond.
On my hell-porch, I will
laugh with friends
about what the prophets knew
but did not share.
There will be no more
churchgoing, no more of that
ever-present asking,
Won’t you join us?
No more holiness lobbed
as a wall against fears,
no more plotting
a fever, that if given enough
it could defeat
the advancing, limitless gray.
Prayers?
I’ve prayed myself free.
In the underworld, I will
be surrounded with a constant
emptying that speaks:
I am your hell,
here is your loosening joy.
The textured abyss will
cool my toes.
There will always be
another room,
ever a lowering spear
winnowing at the self,
ever a reflecting cave
or palace.
Ritter Park Cabin
West Virginia, 2011-2014
A bat circled my head one night.
I woke to the chittering,
sprang for a broom to hook open
the bathroom door, to thwack
it into that room, to command it
gone. When its wings
flecked against my hair, I thought
I was bitten like the laughing teens
who yanked up my mailbox
and tossed it over the dog
park’s fence, or the morning
a raccoon pattered
down my chimney and hissed
along the rafters, how I left
the broom steady yet tedious
in its angle.
When I reopened my bathroom
door after the bat,
it had disappeared—so now,
it will be there forever.
That’s how fear works.
Downward Rooms
I didn’t know what the miners searched for,
but their eagerness made me eager too.
I wandered those uneven rooms, touched
the soot that so enamored them, the corners,
the chalk markers that pointed here, there,
that way. I was not like these men,
heaving their shoulders against darkness, a face
that doesn’t face them, it crumbles away.
When they called me closer, I recognized
the rock’s shape: my own. They insisted
that gems fruit under pressure, given time.
That the stories and memories of my lifetime
were asking for new light. They cheered me on
as I chipped the wall apart.
But grief is grief, I realized; it lives
enough already in the soil and forests, more
commonplace than joy. The miners enjoyed
the hunt, whereas I enjoyed the peace
intrinsic in any calm, thinking that fulfillment
rests between chaos and comfort.
The men slapped my back and laughed,
then lobbed fragments into carts.
They thought to illuminate something meant to
cherish it. That’s not gratitude, I said,
that’s just performance. But they would not
listen, shrinking into their elevator.
Daniel Lassell is the author of Frame Inside a Frame (Texas Review Press, 2025) and Spit (Wheelbarrow Books, 2021), winner of the 2020 Wheelbarrow Books Emerging Poetry Prize. He is also the author of two chapbooks: Ad Spot (Ethel Zine & Micro Press, 2021) and The Emptying Earth (Madhouse Press, 2023), which was a finalist for the 2024 Medal Provocateur Award. He grew up in Kentucky, and now lives in Bloomington, Indiana. Visit his website at www.daniel-lassell.com.
Read two other poems by Daniel Lassell appearing in Terrain.org.
