Poetry by Ivars Balkits

^{The “Void” in several systems of chakra meditation is considered
to lie between the sacral and solar plexus chakras.} 

Some think the universe enters through the fontanelle. Some. But it already is present in the digestive complex. Chains of pearly stars suspend hepatic planets gravitationally in the void that lives between hips and diaphragm. It is the reason the liver glitters like a ballroom chandelier. 

Showering down from the thin muscular dome at the top of the abdominal cavity, meteors follow the lesser and greater curves of the stomach. Beyond the peritoneal veil the kidneys constellate wedding guests, as a comet passes through on its intestinal orbits like a bride with her train. 

Gas planets light the way to the altar back by the spine. Eight-pointed starbursts on pillars glow all down the aisle. In the near distance the groom’s chariot approaches on alimentary winds, the wheels spinning galaxies, the horses adrenally lit. But the groom? has been magically transformed into the rabbit in the moon, squats in the appendix, munching on roughage.

A dual-citizen of Latvia and the USA since 2016, Ivars Balkits lives part of the year in Ohio but mostly in a small mountain village in Crete. His poems and prose have been most recently published by Pnyx, Punt Volat, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Bear Creek Gazette, Synchronized Chaos, Otoliths, Seneca Review, Anvil Tongue Radio, Harpy Hybrid Review, and Lotus Eater. He is a recipient of two Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, for poetry in 1999 and creative nonfiction in 2014.

Photo by Risto Kokkonen on Unsplash