The Golden Ratio Adjusts Her Expectations Skyward
The sky remains the rumor--
just a perfect holy number, a perfect
holy encounter and
an awkward conversation
afterward.
Afterward, vastness cannot be just, cannot be
only one awkward sky.
Afterward, one lover cannot switch places with the sky
to undress the rumor in its perfection.
She lifts a sun-
dress over her head, more vastly dejected
than the horizon might suppose.
Her dejection approaches infinite, perfect dejection.
No love is merely. Is just.
Just dressing up delicately
to put one over on dawn.
I Collapse the Mays I’ve Known into a Hallway and Run Down It, Calling for Help
Glaciers creep across the parking lot
in March, though May blooms: the latest verdant version. I inhale you
and lose sense, willingly the mendicant
in these two weeks of your miraculous purple air.
May’s rainy wind ushers in a synesthesia
with neural shortcuts to spare. In March, I am not safe
nor loved but don’t have a foolproof escape plan. I am not breathing
sweet purple. I collapse my body, inhale tentatively,
make room for a man whose displeasure I fear. Doors slam.
I--foolishly--called out his foolishness. Ice halts my progress.
Arms crossed, whispering threats, this invisibly shifting, slippery surface.
But May is a home
and your scent, Lilacs, my sweetheart.
March sees me parsing my aliveness, aspiring to existence in May,
packing boxes to shuffle across ice
as life’s fool. You--this remembered fragrance--the only kindness.
Here in May I inhale this miracle, collapse into deserving some savor.
The Earth could be home, be help, a blossoming cascading parade.
It isn’t, but you make me curious about parades.
In Their Haste to Fall in Love, Your Selves Forget the Quiz in the Photocopier
I.
A person dreams at night, in sleep. I may become
analogue-me, waking-walking around,
searching you out. You appear
near the photocopier, then my question becomes
the quiz in the photocopier:
Are you
the you
I love
in my dreams?
II.
A person works, sleepwalking through
a morning. You have tasks to do.
Why wouldn’t you make flashcards
about the circulatory system
streaming red and blue?
The last chance, a final review...
Your quizzical look as you reconsider
the quiz question about oxygenated blood
upends my resting heart rate.
When I see the face
I love in my life
I never want to rest.
My heart rate is bubbles filling
with hasty guesses.
III.
Your eyes flash
this wildest card
before my eyes:
the ink cartridge of my dreams
works overtime to offer us our most real beloved,
a reason to effervesce.
My heart rate will not rest.
A Private Kindness
I.
Formed blue with skeins
of yellow caught inside: the afternoon.
A kindness in the yellow-flecked
chalcedony under my palm, worried
by my left hand, by afternoon
on the roof.
II.
Kindness: a private sky-deck. Sanctuary
for the hand swirling cursive
onto shaded pages, for bare feet
sliding on wooden slats.
The afternoon: this blue stone
falling between reveries, language
caught before it was lost.
A deck in some private sky: a stone I long for,
caught in time, arriving blue with the spray
of sun inside. Arriving: an array
of possible nightfalls,
laced agates.
III.
This thought experiment--a blue stone--suns itself
on every possible roof, before the sun sets,
before the afternoon
goes missing.
Amy Poague is an Iowa City-based poet working at a junior high. She holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Juke Joint, The Cabinet of Heed, ISACOUSTIC*, The Mantle, SWIMM Every Day, Really System, Rockvale Review, and Transom. She is online at https://amypoague.wordpress.com/ and on Twitter @PoagueAmy.