Arch Slough the snow- shoe, the dew-damped parka, the five last matches, the kerosene kettle—my head flips open like it’s attached with hinges, & out flutters moths—they all fly where a branch arcs around itself, & shaken out from the gray sky, I fall through the arc’s space, fracture the snowpack,   land the other side of white— a pond un-frozen, geyser of light grissailed & hammered, carved & molded, but it is me breaking into a neurosis of rainbows, a clusterfuck of blue yarn, an epidermis of ruffles I wear when I burn my diary.

 

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Circle Not perfect the collection of limbs looking forcibly shaped, a crisscross with gaps, sluices where winter sun won’t flare, where nimbus resemble Venn Diagram circles too deflated to intersect, & remember the math class with no books, the teacher without her students, the school bus without the snow tires, the ice, the ice was perfect, like black on a raven, like a missile of bird through slush, like a wisp of death in the graveyard, these were my friends, the souls with no parachute, targets forgoing their red, I won’t smear their blood, I won’t lick their femurs, they were my friends, these collections of limbs, forcibly shaped, circles gapped & broken, & me with my sluices.

 

 

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Reach I should slipknot myself to a lawn chair, plunk my feet in a metal washtub of wet cement, hire the clouds to once again release the flakes like hounds, wind doing howling impressions of mob victims, & coerce ghosts of said victims to thrust me on the frozen pond & wait. I own seven hundred thousand pages of self- recrimination, enough to wrap an entire acre of spruce into surrendering their needles, that’s how boring. Minks would haul their back broken legs, still in traps, & offer paws & ask if I need to talk. Not very good listeners, the tortured when midnight’s not crisp, but utterly pathological. And so are we, my lungs teletype against my backbone, which I feel through my coat, which wears another coat, which smells of dead geese, the weak ones’ flying, lowering.

 

 

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Liz Tran has been awared residencies from Vermont Studio Center, Millay, Marnay Art Center, among others. Her most recent work will be shown at the Seattle Art Museum Gallery as part of their Summer Introductions Series. www.liztran.com

Joseph P. Wood is the author of one full book of poetry, I & We (CustomWords), and four chapbooks of poems--the most recent, A Severing (Cinematheque Press), is a collaboartion with the painter Salena Gerdes which focuses on found dead insects and birds. His most recent poetry be found in BOMB, Poetry London, Gargoyle, Drunken Boat, Typo, among others.