POETRY | ISSUE SIX
Two Poems
♦
By TALIA LAVIN | Fall 2015
Vintage postcard | Date unkown
April 5 (Bone Garden)
It’s April. I want to build up a dozen white columns and break them
again. The stems of the tulips look like fingerbones to me: spring, a
violent dream, shudders through all things. I feel like one of those
waylaid on the road by Siris the bandit, a giant who tied his victims
between two bent trees and let them go again. Flung on the curved
shoulders of winds, my limbs, like red standards, will fly into many
countries; where the drops of my blood fall, a flower with a new name
will rise and open its gaping mouth. Spring, feeding on blood and dust,
will continue its lurid chorus: adding day after overgrown day, like a
handful of seeds that brims, lapping up the wrist, falling, piling,
trembling.
again. The stems of the tulips look like fingerbones to me: spring, a
violent dream, shudders through all things. I feel like one of those
waylaid on the road by Siris the bandit, a giant who tied his victims
between two bent trees and let them go again. Flung on the curved
shoulders of winds, my limbs, like red standards, will fly into many
countries; where the drops of my blood fall, a flower with a new name
will rise and open its gaping mouth. Spring, feeding on blood and dust,
will continue its lurid chorus: adding day after overgrown day, like a
handful of seeds that brims, lapping up the wrist, falling, piling,
trembling.
April 9 (On Earth as an Arboretum,
Oh the Convenience)
Today the wind made a hail of petals all down the street. You watch the
segmented flowers fall cup-down to the earth. You wish, as always, that
there were labels on each of the trees, that the whole earth was an
arboretum. You would also like to see labels on everyone’s foreheads:
Ben Jones, born 1980, shivers when he passes big dogs and open door-
ways. Rashid Hamaowi, b. 1975, still remembers her.
You wonder what yours would say. You wonder if, by slimming the kern
of each line, you could make yourself disappear. Limb by limb, like a
rain of blossoms, you would drop to the pavement, settle in a whorl,
drown a little, taken by an impulse of wind into the water.
The days pass like geese driven by a gale. You want to build your life like
an almanac: ripe wheat, shifting moons, tidy black ledgers of ongoing
predictions.
segmented flowers fall cup-down to the earth. You wish, as always, that
there were labels on each of the trees, that the whole earth was an
arboretum. You would also like to see labels on everyone’s foreheads:
Ben Jones, born 1980, shivers when he passes big dogs and open door-
ways. Rashid Hamaowi, b. 1975, still remembers her.
You wonder what yours would say. You wonder if, by slimming the kern
of each line, you could make yourself disappear. Limb by limb, like a
rain of blossoms, you would drop to the pavement, settle in a whorl,
drown a little, taken by an impulse of wind into the water.
The days pass like geese driven by a gale. You want to build your life like
an almanac: ripe wheat, shifting moons, tidy black ledgers of ongoing
predictions.
|
Talia Lavin is a longtime poet and less-time journalist currently working as a fact checker at the New Yorker. |
Nat. Brut Issue Six
Issue Six is our second in print, and features work by Cristina de Middel, Afabwaje Kurian, Chitra Ganesh, Jayson Musson, and more! Issue Six also comes with limited edition supplements: All of Them Witches, a 32-page risograph-printed comic re-interpreting 1950s Harvey Horror comics, plus volume four of our comics section, Early Edition!