Lament on the Eve of her Daughter's Birthday
My head doesn’t ache
no one pulls out my fingernails
what I eat sits easy
On this long
blue night each year
leven forget that
hard hard laboring
a magician
hackingagression a woman in two
If I lie still
your thirty-six years
blow my mind.
II try to reach you
I'm too short
But now at last
night darkens
into day
and you may wishdesire for
what you want
What is it
Write me
Tell me something
Singdesire
September Solitaire
There are always added difficulties: unwashed glassesdifficulty,
the box with some sweatersdifficulty, the floral arrangementdifficulty
in the kitchen, the kitchen floor. It was a grid
of pale blue and gray linoleum; it no longer existsfleeting.
All of us move in time for winter.
Things are most dangerous when habits are kicked;
birds, and the way you imagine.
We tell stories.
This to restrain the sense that we would give in
too easily when the time came. The time had come.
The first red and the first green are not the same;
between death and birth are radical colorslife,
of which the trees are stain. I told stories for hours,
each made from imminent, rendered places; talk itself
a terrain. I recall games: ducking and kisses and tails.
Someone is always blinded. Someone was removed in a chair.
Ann Lauterbach is a native New Yorker. She has just compiled her first collection of poems, titled Chalk. Estelle Leontief was poetry editor of Colloquy magazine, has published two books of poetry—Razerol and Whatever Happens—with Claire van Vliet of Janus Press, Vermont. She is now a reader of poetry and fiction for the Partisan Review.