NEW! 2 poems by Stephanie Burns

Stephanie Burns

TWO POEMS

Spring in the Winter Garden

I’ve known you to be cross-eyed for a while now.
Like the flared fat pigeon on its crumbling
headstone, you mix your lefts
and rights until the whole world is less
stable than before. In the shops,
in the malls, they are folding
clothes into shapes that can never
be emulated in real life.
I guess we are all facing south when we die.

There is, ever so slightly, something
to be heard on this balcony.
I’ve watched others writing it down
in complicated twirls and all too ordinary
snapshots. I know that the backs
of their heads want to breathe.
Then again, I am all that strives to be,
but is not, more than too-tight pants
and curled hair.
We are taking notes on each other.

Dear Good Sir—
I am not dangerous. Kindly stop thinking it.
Sincerely yours, etc. etc.

This year we will not smoke in the hallways
or clack in high heels. I am meeting
only people too bored for me.
You have been one of them.

You are letting it be too obvious.
You are staring too much.
You cannot let it be known
that things have gone radio electric
in front of you. Keep a distance
and healthy swagger.

Otherwise, you will glint into the scene
and everything you’ve collected
in a dusty shoebox under a bed
will slip away into trash.
We are only the poses we can commit to being.

Secret doors and miniskirts meet
under your eyes. They rile against
your skin. Toys turn to roses
and sad hands are held.

I know you are hasty and that
you can’t stop actively being pretty.
This is how it all portraits—protests
and steamy hot mornings.

If I become cold or undernourished,
I will know it is because we have built
ourselves this winter garden,
but shattered its glass with our first breaths.



Poem on Talking to You

Out of a cut
in my arm I pull a dove,
a tightrope, a bright red sunset.
My arms are useless in this way.
Their gestures are worthless and awkward—
awkwardness the tragedy hovering over me,
resilient as fruit flies.
I’ve killed the impulse for natural reactions.

Pronunciation slips in and out—
I hardly know what I am saying.
Now in the back of the scene,
I don’t talk. I paint
my face to mean, “Stardust,
appleseed, march hare, revolution.”

The paint chips away
and blankets the area, nearly
as inconsequential as it could have been
in my head.

NEW! Laura Larson & Brian Teare

Haze, 2003



There is neither God nor nature in photography. Like faith
a discrete series of disappearances; like God the abrading of
arrested motion—landscape is active absence, part of the
design. That’s why photography’s trees can never be the trees
of painting or of nature : we expect them to correspond to
themselves and then they slip, asymbolic, outside of religion,
outside of ritual until the upper limit of our nostalgia seems a
high green canopy and its lower a mat of rust-colored needles
so thick and acidic it permits no undergrowth, a perspective
intended for reverie. Nature is essential to photography’s
invention, but it’s the picturesque—a way of picturing nature—
that aids photography’s development. It becomes more difficult
to position the frame : does photography simply wipe out one
space in order to invent another? Good-bye, perhaps. The first
art in which God never existed, its trees arranged by men.

Discursive Glance





A Picture That Includes by Means of Its Structure the Excluded Space



I’ve held this
smallest forest


sticky with sap
haptic branches swaying


in nonce wind—
a syntax


outside the frame
of the visible—


and longed to be struck
as I should
to say I’ve loved


It’s no small thing


Let each eye
be believed


the way cicadas leave
clinging skins


split to drone
umbra’s grass


Let matter rest
in belief


it has lent itself
to all our purposes


liminal and image
the way veronica is


a flower
a girl watching
a matador


wave his cape
over charging eyes—


each only once
given one


of matter’s many
possible nouns


Let each pass by


picture
difference
or surprise


In that still space
we won’t stop


finding and losing
what we love


all day
we’ll keep on



thinking
because it once existed


it still exists


very arbor very body
very smoke