Lynn Strongin

GETS ME BETWEEN THE EYES All about dying:
The quail eggs would have been baby quails
roses fading against quilted sky, stitches unravelling. Unwashed clouds.

You beam. I am at the place where all is derelict.
It is Sunday
I cannot move about in the bed. My voice, my concern urgent, ongoing.

A balcony with no rails
I want to kiss you before the sun goes down.
After life, before death
Give me Harlem, the Bowery
A last breath sounding in lungs of flower dust on Sunday pavement: our old age pensions sail in, 
 twinned, sails clipped, bronzed.

*

ICE FRONTIER Dusty blue, in lug boots
You are irresistible
Waking to my pain cry, ice-wolf, aged, past midnight, near what’s called morning.

This is because you are tall & come carrying the hot water bottle
as though it were your child.
Unwrapping the child from yowel is calyx

Bud stands shivering in the cold of the afterlife
Or like it
Air so bluely light, cold.
We are not freaks in a sideshow
We are children in a wards scabbed by a soap so rough heart becomes translucent.