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Four Late-Autumn Poems Ngoc Doan

Bodied Sleep scent that never leaves flesh is flesh errors in the shape of life in piercing ices       the rain falls ceiling things    replaced we cannot mend our shells in night Amaranth a dream hung out the night soft off beds perpending sleep, you don’t come without relations dissolve * howled autos passing nearby highway tract houses rickety bellow wooded this area * stench in autumn’s lingering road-    kills    skunk    this unpleasant misplacement smelts between seasons androgynous as paranormal that comes                                        over trees with their leaves still can’t hold so much snow weighs             suspended * in- spacious reality intern gray the evening mute the night blank I feed deafness * light the night diffuse echo on edge drink where is the shore    he fears and the devil * we take what we want on the crescent    the breast an impatient machine it grows quicker * fret and not     nothing will be lost, this         winning bread       its token for us the sun unravels       days and more divided    for the unmeasured              a memory         branches bare awaiting winter’s old                           approaches The Night Had Two moved to commune—came mingled us among morals chased olives in pool gin rendezvous & speech of smoke, a falling sense like water taste drowned that world found in public toilet seat, a pubic hair The World That Blew Us effaced sun has dyed through fog and frost you know the repose while it lasts feel low for fear of it wait the dying leaves evacuate flocks of feathers dome the gray sky awaken early winter’s sharpened winds chilling our words blow us storms, when you stay up there in nameless clouds Ngoc Doan lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she is a student of poetry at UMass-Amherst. This is her first published work. □