Erika Lutzner
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

I gave birth to life.
It went out of my entrails.
Only the parasite trembles
On the threshold of new days,
I confess I am only broken by the sources of things;
As if words were counted like dead bees in the attic,
Unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings.
Anger, as black as a hook, overtakes me.

Sources: Sylvia Plath, Anna Swir, Osip Mandelstam, Mary Jo Bang, Anne Sexton

*

I think you are a fever dream.

I imagine the way cinnamon meets honey.
To be a writer is to apply lotion to one’s forehead to
sing untranslatable lullabies to Brussels sprouts.
Poetry is a sort of homecoming.

Sources: Alexandra Smyth, Joanna Fuhrman, Paul Celan