Lush
Here, Kitty, come and look at my plan; I shall think I am a great architect, if I have not got
incompatible stairs and fireplaces. -Middlemarch
I.
Shut the window to the garden!
When the paper blinds you had
crinkled just so, not enough to keep light
out or us—
When the blinds folded as accordions
were replaced—
Not the cold room, chill in summer from
constant air…
Not the empty apartment sans couch,
us long on the rug your mother mailed
by the cardboard table you painstakingly
constructed when you looked at me
and whispered
my middle name…
We’re czars, you said, Nicholas and Katherine.
II.
Now complex curtains hang,
(inverted Georgia O’Keeffe Above the Clouds I)
with just enough variation you say as I think it,
something that would be flowers in the Midwest intentionally skewed
abstraction
that means
everything’s curated—
And I can’t see out the window anymore,
just assume it is closed.
Do You Like What I Was When It Was Already Was?
Sometimes—most times, maybe—it feels
a woman is constituted by what time makes impossible to keep,
the disintegration of self heightening with that precarity
for the moments that exist when the appearance of something, its acknowledgement,
signifies what is already gone, like children looking at a star that is dead,
illumination of the past a reality that is false as it happens.
I look at myself in a mirror next to him and his reflection looks so different from what I see.
I think of the time I’ve wasted,
looking at men, this one with a head like the moon, myself alone
in the planetary echo of wanting to feel love in the craters of a new reality.
Two of the white flowers in my neighbor’s pot have turned pink,
unseasonable heat. (He—the man I used to want—loves the heat
but keeps his room ice-box cold.) The pink of flowers, so beautiful, are a sign something’s wrong.
Time. Decay. Dangerous conditions creating beauty to the untrained eye…
Vanessa Ogle is a writer and educator. She is the Poetry Editor at The Metropolitan Review and writes Class is in Session and Comedy Distant.