Jennifer Elise Foerster

My crown. My room. Surrounding snow. These are not my hands, my winter shoes carried off by uncertain music. There was a meadow behind my house and if I should see myself there she would tell me there was never a meadow and then walk through me as if through a cloud and carry on in her own solitary direction. Crows still caw in her palace garden— tram rails, rain, stammering moon. Once lilacs bloomed their huge white knuckles breaking the winter of my room— it was a dream—French windows on a Viennese street. Every street I cross angling alongside smoggy postwar artifices branches scratch against my sleep. How my body was a branch in my sleep. And when I woke years later I peered down upon it leafless and stiff. No roosts left, no caw. No birds blooming in my dream’s green crooks. Afternoons alone are labyrinthine. I wander the city, searching for what? Friends, we knew where to find each other, tapping the window of the winter room. We were thinner then, younger than the chestnut trees. Everything has its seed much later and on the other side of time.

for Cosetta Once there were coyotes, cardinals in the cedar. You could cure amnesia with the trees of our back-forty. Once I drowned in a monsoon of frogs— Grandma said it was a good thing, a promise for a good crop. Grandma’s perfect tomatoes. Squash. She taught us to shuck corn, laughing, never spoke about her childhood or the faces in gingerbread tins stacked in the closet. She was covered in a quilt, the Creek way. But I don’t know this kind of burial: vanishing toads, thinning pecan groves, peach trees choked by palms. New neighbors tossing clipped grass over our fence line, griping to the city of our overgrown fields. Grandma fell in love with a truck driver, grew watermelons by the pond on our Indian allotment, took us fishing for dragonflies. When the bulldozers came with their documents from the city and a truckload of pipelines, her shotgun was already loaded. Under the bent chestnut, the well where Cosetta’s husband hid his whiskey—buried beneath roots her bundle of beads.They tell the story of our family.

To be a bride of my own lamentation I wear a dress not of time’s poisoned quills but feathers of discontent — kingfishers ghosting in cornstalks, my field of frozen flutes. The edge of descent, digression’s highway brings a particulate ash to my mouth, starry metals of the meadow’s cold snap, ravens in the sycamore scorched to black. I follow their echo’s loop and chase. I master the map of never, raft its fragments, mouth the brightness of human’s leftover snow, details of fever-clouds where the convent dissolves in violence. I wear the canyon like a blank eye, lay before the never-returning light my silhouette, fossil of the drowned town’s scroll. • Here, where your ghost is always departing the ebb and flow of terrestrial tides, I follow your echo’s loop and chase, vortex streets of a cylindrical sound infinite in its arrangements of light. The evening veil, a partial reveal — how I appear to myself looking past this fact of being underway. Each day I stow my earthen materials in preparation for the never-end. In the snapshot of my dead friend, hanging in the room where loved ones refuse return: a gradual reduction of color. Running out of time, neck-deep in water, we knew no one was coming to help us in the same way one denies language to come from a picture. I imagine love a revelation, not of mind — the blue gauze of planetary motion — a tone-on-tone painting of a body floating on the sea’s shifting horizons. It is a question of legibility. When I became tired of depicting poetry, I became aware of another kind of plane, the kind good for dwellings and their narrative escape. Here children sit up all night by the flames — the orphan boy from blood-stained pottery who singed his head and burned out both his eyes. That was your life, a prefix for fire. Spider will weave a ladder to your heart, it is said, even though you are sleeping, intoxicated by abandonment, a bitter wind reminiscent of a wave. • In the last days of my marriage to god, I wandered his spiraled library to read in the dark blank imprints of trees. Relentless navigation through the stacks of shell-tempered mortuary offerings, sandstone saws recovered from the caves. I lingered on the stairs of the convent to write these things, to recollect myself. Around midnight the mountains returned. The clouds dispersed into semicolons and I with them, into a new language, its boat temporary, invisible. I knew I would be traveling like this for centuries. This was my first attempt at vanishing. I would return before anyone noticed poems to be found in the forest, not the mind. There’s a canyon between this version of me and the shadow in the corner that is mine. I wear this canyon like a blank eye.