Anvil Crawler, by Holly Lyn Walrath

John Bernhard (USA, b. Switzerland). Contemporary. Click for artist website.

​Anvil Crawler

I am night and a thousand stars hurtle through my skin, punching through the ether.
I crouch, prehistoric, in the space behind clouds, my volcanic heart attracting lightning sympathetic, interstellar.

My shadow is a supernova cutting a path through the light, slimming ever thinner
until nothing else remains. My insides negative, the darkness turned out,
pepper-black and coal-hard.

Lightning waits for me on the other side of the forest. He’s tall and thin,
pale or blue, holding me in, but this isn’t a cage. These aren’t flowers
I’m pollenating—they’re caves spelunked, mountains cliff-hung,
open seas hard to port, hives honey-brimmed and buzzing places where
I can hide.

​​Holly Lyn Walrath
​

This poem was first published along with these images in the book Dreamlike Art and Deviations (Art Pub Books) by John Bernhard.

​​Holly Lyn Walrath’s poetry and short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Fireside Fiction, Luna Station Quarterly, Liminality, and elsewhere. Her chapbook of words and images, Glimmerglass Girl, will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2018. She holds a B.A. in English from The University of Texas and a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. She is a freelance editor and host of The Weird Circular, an e-newsletter for writers containing submission calls and writing prompts. You can find her canoeing the bayou in Seabrook, Texas, on Twitter @HollyLynWalrath, or at www.hlwalrath.com.

John Bernhard is a Swiss American artist, photographer and writer who traveled North America extensively before settling in Houston, Texas in 1980. For more than three decades he has chosen the medium of photography to explore the everyday world from new perspectives, breaking away into different pathways of artistic expression. Bernhard was educated at the EPSIC Technical College in Lausanne and at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs de Geneve in Switzerland. He is the author of nine books, the most recent of which is Dreamlike Art & Deviation. Beginning in 1985 with a solo exhibition at the Houston Center for Photography, Bernhard has had more than 30 solo shows, three museum exhibitions, and many collective exhibitions throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Bernhard’s work has been reviewed in publications such as Communication Arts, Graphis, Photo District New Magazine, The Houston Chronicle, ArtSpeak Magazine, Swiss Review, and has been widely published in such books as Love & Desire by William A. Ewing, (Chronicle Books), Female Contemporary Nude Photography III, (UDYAT), Spain, and Nude Bible, (Tectum Publishers, Belgium).