The Unique Thoughts of Otherhood
By Sina Queyras
After Alfred Noyes
unmount
Umber tail mount,
Seven bubbles, sad
Balk of night,
Red tulip lunges.
Incandescent felt tips,
Small ochre waves
In the nape
Of greening brick.
Simile-clad branches
Vascular, the leather
Cusp of April
Or glass leaves:
Nest of pages
In a sweep.
woof
Coil helix rain.
Congregation gully up.
Cold steel compress
Her rosy ways.
Rattle a cocoon,
Three twins falling
Combat lost nap
Wool in Woolf.
Brittle sheep tossed,
Biotic petrol lagoon:
Morning sex lyric
Ever after umber:
Where the knobby
Moose pins glisten.
perroquet
Hooked rug or
Gursky’s 99 cent.
By the thousand
Field, bunch, vase,
Swooped pink neckline
Tailored as crinoline
Fringed, parrot, Rembrandt
Ovoid domesticated bowl.
Swivel in red
Armless white linen,
Visualization of unnatural
Interactive selection bias:
What the daffodil
Could not accomplish.
swivel
Owls curtain his
Future, a violent
Wave rumbling beneath
The brown floorboards.
I’m a bad
Mother, impatient, tiny-
Fisted body crumpled
Against my chest,
Aquatic gulps of
Air, the owls,
Prickling our chests.
The bad finger
Points back, points
At the pointer.
chisel
After Steve McCaffery’s “Tyrolean Night”
Suddenness is other,
A numerical chill
Sphere machine, a
Tall Bashō bathes.
Pond jumps in
To frog, insults
Are all sex,
Is mute sagas,
Is daylight upended,
Drunken, you sang
The totem up:
The wind did
What shrewd words
So rarely do.
Source: Poetry (January 2014)