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07.14.21
Five Poems
Usual Food

Wrote a raw angel in a telegram
A chromolithograph:
Instead of two roses in a pipe
Into the next room

It went live in a field, 
For on this very
To be honest, once I had
Four years there.

People aren’t there to crack.
Looks up to celebrate halfway,
Mass possession 
At the nunnery.

Learned to eat artichokes
Tonight and to cut one pineapple. 
Snacks for my whole
Bloodsucking son

Duplicate eye please
Don’t make me be the host. 
What if your examiner
Is not wild enough?
 


Untitled

I held a chicken, a dead one, under my arm, and into bed
tucked with me.


My head cracks against the ceiling and slams back
into my stolid body,

shimmering, as the voice down there, and in here,
asks other you

to feel something. Twice. My carcass lifts 
up the stairs into the shower box and takes a shower.

I hear your slight whimper downstairs. I am not a ghost,
says my fetid body, which feels its head jam

ad infinitum, and pour back into its legitimized
vestibule, noggin, flute glass. Into a shimmering 

cranium, letting it spin like a toy car doing donuts. 
Water necessitating this transaction, anti-baptismal.

Joints hiccup down the flight, seesawing,
sighing into each hip, a light pop of being herself again,

into the courtyard, sans dust, once I was 
there. At each back of hand, goosebump flurry,

pinprick guts, and spreading like a food poisoning
or a third-degree burn, brought about by my own

noise pollution. It’s too late for birds to chirp.
I traverse the long street. It doesn’t turn any which

way. Curls into a matte field. Gray concoction
of different types of air. I made light of all this.
 


Larva
 
I.
 
Like a fish needs a bicycle,
I want a weeping angel in my tomb.
 
Took her baby down the hall, and eggs them.
 
A detail in a ruffle?
That at the soul’s call, a native soul shores
 
itself up:
An ocean made out of coffee and arithmetic.
We sing, most common vertebrate on the
planet, 
Snowy desert,
Future. Will
I meet
you. 

II.

I remember them taking the picture and being upset by it.
 
Somehow aperture is the blank canvas of a human head
that then like night melts into the ground around the fountain.
 
The dahlias, which are rooted, are uprooted and likened to flying beings that then, like
night, melt into the ground around the fountain and so rooted again.
 
Without coloring within the lines:
 
After the sun has done its fair share of staring,
the earlier coastal garden which tossed the dahlias therefore also returns. So does the idea of a
face. What exactly
are these clouds shredding to bits?
 
When you leave a penny in a fountain, night takes on 
the owl’s traits.

III.

Holy upon
holies:

These gelatinous oak trees,
depicted in the cream of oil. . .

They’ve had good horses in the past,
and I believe that they’re gonna continue to have good horses.
You will need to remove your lithium batteries
from your smartbag.

 
And all manner of head swerves.
Three people flew past me, but did not see.
It’s not even clear what happens to the chicken on the bobsled.
 
Trails . . . that slither with their cake.
Will you have more?
 
I didn’t even think about clothes.
I knew how close the sea was.
 
Is this the roof, or the blood?
 
IV.
 
No, I don’t want that sack of violets.
 
My teeth were ground down and I 
was chewing on them and wondered
should I spit them out??
 
Like when I made my playlist about silhouettes,
and then the two cops walked by.
Autocorrect tried to turn enjambment into enjoyment, 
and we practiced “adventure.”
 
V.
 
The daughter dances. The day is. After
supper, fireworks. We accede 
to obvious myths.
 
I installed some glass
in his hand. Will pop in for a few circa
8. Sorry my dog is rude,

the plants, not happy in this smoke,
yawning on your tomb, moult.
Like the dandelions asleep on your feet.
Goat skin has gotten to be very expensive.
 
I keep you low.
Words can stand between people.
The church burned down.
 
VI.
 
nothing with smoke
a tree near a symphony
ripening in the ear sun
was such food to you
a pool for these birds 
drawing your horns in
 


Augur

Dead rings on the mattress. A square hurls itself into rain. Everyone stops me there, because you are satisfied. I don’t
look myself up. An egg ties itself
to a fan. I don’t
wish to be. I feel a deep frustration in the gut of my cat, and a weird hither icon. Droplet lances off a tree. Helping yourself go haywire,
hoping you don’t go
to the wrong side of incidence, wilting phantasm. And a gorgeous gourd of light, both making their way to my palms.
A protractor, where education has gone
wrong. A tilt a long hour is it wrong that your filter has not gripped my filter? Has grappled
and filed it away. 
Why does your ending this
sound so silly to me. I want to be respectful. A cream kerchief flick away from the chicken held
head down and all of us going
at it with the harsh lights one after one in the kitchen.
A gallows, numbing summoning
sensation closure of my allergic eyelids without consent the meds demanding that you sleep. On top of another hour of life
a helpful paradise. Why are all of us winking.
How little I understood.
I hope you go sideways, where it’s safe. I hope you 
flipping through phonebooks craven by daylight. It’s a synergy a serial mode of crackling how can you hang that fish on high,
proverbial idol. A landmark whines filling myself out entirely
are you sure you haven’t been. And a great giant square seizes itself entirely casting off a lion stretching its paws forward.
I remember your jauntiness. A huffing pastry trying to keep up
cubicle after shade after compartment 
after sliding hefty glass door.
A devastation of oranges, their peels left in a riot of rinds all over the floor a carrot’s gentle
landing darting hesitancies flavored eggs
you will favor me.
A long succession of telling interfaces no better than your blooming guttural cheeks helping
along of my lime
along gumline
elastic surmising 
culling flour vents of air upon
another helping of sand and a gleeful fierce excuse for staying behind when we’re all out of it will you
remind me of our wind.
Please have curling on its own.
A beautiful June day did not augur any cataclysm. Those motherfuckers are loosey goosey as fuck.
Heat is intertwining with the people outside.
 


Answering Machine

An insular box of light.
A slowed down box of unkempt light.
She feels right about everything,
but your scruff. It is difficult for her

Not to resent her coffee,
each cup like a well.
While I was notarizing wet paper bags
with my municipal initials.

Because I grew up on sun,
I only hemorrhaged for a while.
It was my job to turn them in.

 

Alex Braslavsky is a scholar and translator of Polish and Russian poetry, as well as a poet. She is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Harvard Slavic Department and writes scholarship through a comparative poetics lens. As a 2021 American Literary Translators Association Mentee, she is translating the poetry of Zuzanna Ginczanka. She is working on her first poetry collection, Answering Machine.