Terese Svoboda

Mother burns on the other side of the bridge.
...

The silence water makes,
and waterfowl on their mark.
...

A stick, pared clean—no, a silver-topped
bamboo-with-dagger, class doubling as club,
the advantage of gravity lifted high
...

She dances only in her necklace,
scotch-lit surely. He touches his glasses.
...

You don't need a machine to do that.
A plastic bag will do. But he built it,
his tools cast about in the unit
while he got up his nerve to use it.
...

A name or idea settles on me
while this dove flies an eight
over the wainscoting, while wind
overcomes it, flap by flap,
...

All the ivy ever cannot
cover what you see
in peekaboo. The great fly-by-
nights, Satan and his fold,
...

Who goes there? Hamlet
in hirsute, nude as a pickle,
dragging the skull as toy.
...

Who loots the dew or enjoins
a shadow to guard a tree?
The bird in the pie can't pretend
to arms, its claws rock
...

A De Chirico head aslant on a coverlet,
body mostly flown, the dazed prayers dumb.
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Dogs slink around her bed in hunger.
Lest you make sacred her image
on a brick, on your drive or thumb,
she needs to be turned twice a day
...

Walking backward from the sea,
scales shedding, you seek the cave.
This is why the French door admits
only ocean. You stare into the louver
...

A red-faced lion raises its maw.
I could be in the supermarket, saran wrap thrown back
but there's Hope Wanted Alive scrawled along
all the mud-slick side streets
...

Emotion is more electrical,
our foot caught on the cord,
the blink we have to take.
...

The tomato sauce upsets twice,
almost suffocating his small self,
that much sauce—but no
blood, no, the dream's resistant,
...

Oo-la-la. A Heisenberg space,
your eyes trapped in your eyes.
You can make no physical gesture,
...

Big wheelers circle in the sand
to cut a perfect something
between flotsam and carwreck.
...

My bike floats on a road
without a moon or light, all balance.
I open my mouth, O sole mio
but I fear I will fall
...

Aphra Behn is not wearing all her clothes
in some part of South America nobody knows.
Everyone is polite, and not. Maybe she left off
her petticoats, her skirts look limp. She coughs.
...