CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive
Daniel Coudriet
Huecos
Dozens of beds burrowing in the yard.
The saddest time is remembering names
& shivers. You have resonating cloud lots.
My arteries are your dimly lit motels
the tiny keys swimming into the doors.
I feel a limited conversation in bakeware.
I scattered phones around the landscape
but I never expected the seas to creep
out of them. Infantile seas discovering
the world like small nostrils. I felt inspired
by kitchenettes & threadbare towels.
I called you several times from other places
of the same room. There were curvatures
to the staircases we hadn’t accounted for
the garden we were inside or bright porcelain
shards that covered every touchstep.
It was so warm there my clothes I never
noticed the ground or the mooring lines.
It was hard to find sea tracks in sea.
Teleférico
I’m growing children
in small crevices
between other apartments
& telling nobody names
for them until they see
them as neighbors
in the hallways.
Downstairs a stenographer
is rehearsing
the filthiest verdicts.
They’ve tethered eggs
on a wire up the mountainside.
I’ve walked there holding
the eggshells
inside my cheeks.
I want a new life
but they follow me
with folding chairs
& checked tablecloths.
Outing
The cityblock is an apple resting against
the door. I would mean this if translated.
If sunlight hitting the wooden stairs
we walked through its undergrowth
swamping. The stairwell is unlikely.
Why not take precautions? Take sun
to the left and build an atrium
shouting stop walking through the blood
of the air. These rowhouses laugh softly
inside like breastfeeding cats.
I’m on an outing I have no idea when
it began to have a mouth or bright colors
over the bricks the tin roofs fire escapes
licking the harbor like a fist, and if
that Swedish flag had fallen from the cargo
we’d have no enormous box of bonbons
for the whole neighborhood to crowd inside.
Daniel Coudriet lives with his wife and son in Richmond, Virginia, and in Carcarañá, Argentina. He is the author of Say Sand (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010) and Parade (Blue Hour Press, forthcoming in late 2010). His poems have made recent appearances in Verse, Ploughshares, Boston Review, Octopus, the Laurel Review, Handsome, and elsewhere. His translations of Argentinean poetry have appeared in many journals.
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