Alexandra Mattraw

Dawn

after Rimbaud

I embraces aught, unknowing, a summer.

Palaces are rendered from field weeds.

Water’s fringe. Between quiet foot imprints,

mud routings, not the wooden toys children polish.

I woke, walked, revived by sepals’ violet wind

tides. I reasoned with a dirt road.

Naked feet promise enterprise, in the sense of

already being a place. Phrases blemish my face, spoken

to no one: to reeds I can’t name.

Allowances. I lean in, votive, in the going, in

streetside raw agate. I denounces the red and

green codes. Old town fumes shine street clocks

and church domes with diesel. Fog currents mediate

the marble arched train station. I chase myself.

Projection: Domestics

I want specifics. Perimeters make a place : popcorn kernels you leave in the doorway where shoes collect cracked leather. Unknown dander laces the eyelet of my mouth. In lamplight, a used sponge street agate blackens. I attempt to translate each part : A white flap Chinese fortune you picked from a yellow street weed. You claim there’s more agency in a thing left untouched for so long. As if, looking through it, a water glass curves lamp glow or measures a piano leg’s strength. To fix diameter, I count plants and stack books in each corner of the room. The plants grow in dirt where rocks were and water grows in your voice. All around mine. I try to build an invariable : fold between bed and white linen. Afternoon is late and fogs sky glass but promises to return nothing. Zippers click dryer hum. Shower steam recalls places you’ve been. The faucet will someday outrun us. I watch you stuff the fortune in a plastic bag to preserve it.

Mystique

after Rimbaud

Street posts or talons angle their tourniquets.

Arms and robes in the lane. Dimmed carnage.

Little flames beneath juniper lean, summer’s

medallions. Under the city terraces, we arrest

a piñata, a parasol. Death in the vendor’s model

boat. Little pigeons’ screeching filaments.

We rearrange ticket stubs passengers

scattered behind. Orient asphalt.

Lies become irises starred skyward. Their faces

lit tapers. Like bread, opposed to facts. Reams of

blue and gold dissolve, await consumption.

Projection: There is a Country

Horizon sloughs the sun away and sea foam tosses its woman’s hair. But this doesn’t exist. We invent distance. We chase rain, fallen wind-sheets. We billow as linen, swimming inside the folds of carbonated seas. Here, death is a word only. Long cities reach: streetlights in pointillism. Androgynous skyscrapers hold hands. So we listen anyway: wind blankets nakedness. As if knowing, lilies nod on the greens.