Alexis Pope
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In my dream we were hanging fresh cut lavender.
Recurring parts. A man on a boat, a bus. He takes me to my apartment.
There was the bridge, lifting. People under water. A subway system of boats. I was trying to get home.
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I tell you, “I’m beginning to feel possessive of you.”
I tell you, “I’m not doing that well today.”
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“My brother and I have very similar voices.”
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Outside the window I can see the orange flash against the wing.
Your face keeps changing. Your touch is beginning to
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I scrape the skins clean, spoon the green fruit.
The tomatoes were tough but I ate them. Period taste. Metal and bone. The seeds wound when cut.
“A scar is memory. Memory is wrong.” –Bhanu Kapil
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Claire in a round, blue hat. Dark eyes, darken.
Sahar tells us her name means first light of morning.
I consider my own hands.
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Wants to know where language stops.
Where “I” is given up.
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Tell me where I should stand,
you know, to hear it better.
Optimal sound play,
a girl in a room.
Sleeping is a noise,
maybe the loudest.
Explain your vulnerability.
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Who drinks Pepsi anymore?
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Julie says necessity in action. I’m not sure if she said inaction.
A felt distance.
A letter over time. Until all is given up, textual memory.
We: deconstructed.
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They ghost at the limits. Below these / traces of language. Beneath you. The pelvic butterflies, she explains.
Poets making love, the sheets.
The way the shapes change depending on the / specifics of secretions and the white dries clear or clear / dries white.
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“Can we please say soon-to-be-ex wife,” you say.
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“Does the person behind the scream matter?”
“Fundamentally as animals.”
I wonder where did he get the cellophane and why did he wrap it so carelessly.
I look down to find snot on my sleeve. I don’t remember sneezing.
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And in the elevator I told you I thought we’d die. So we locked the door. The room with hard pillows, the biggest cockroach we’d ever seen, non-dairy creamer.
Evacuate my body through. On my knees. Plastic art, infinite.
The body is not a discrete form of nature.
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Dear dad,
I wake up on the airplane, which is surprising. I can never sleep on planes. Maybe my eyes are less puffy.
The music in my ears—what I mean is in the dream she was leaning to my right ear. Her words were the music or blocked by the music or
I fell asleep again, ate a banana, peed. Those men watched me walk down the aisle. They watched me walk back.
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A severed fold. I hear severe, without.
There: shadow of the Presbyterian Church. I grew in the shade of the crabapple tree’s pink blossoms.
Remember how bright? The spring after K’s death. I can’t remember if they blossomed like that again.
I’m sure they did.
Alexis Pope is the author of Soft Threat (2014), as well as three chapbooks. Recent work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, cream city review, Poor Claudia, Prelude, and The Volta, among others. Pope lives in Chicago with her daughter.
