in parentheses

Klara Pokrzywa is a poet and librarian born in Michigan and now living in New York. Her interests dwell in the archival, the imaginary, and the longform. Her work has been previously published by 4×4 Magazine, the Counterclock Collective, Annotations, and others. Find her at a bingo night near you.

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dream theory:

Now sudden warmth, machine of coping.
    Your embrace amidst plague; I was dreaming; I turned
    us both to light-pools. You wished me well—
    regrettably I never said thank you, waking
    to wannabe, weather changing.

    Spring is foxhole season; die
    side by side.
    Say it: crave it: download its software:
    the theory is that imagining something in great detail will make it so
    (doesn’t work; instead settle for deficiency
    which is craving of dirt).
    Goes the line about natural features, corresponding remoteness and their long lovely names.
    At some point nothing
    was as interesting as midwestern loud melody and its attendant clay,
    out in the end before it happens.
    Well I know what I know.

    In sleep go mudlarking, attempting heroics for sympathy. Dredging
    our hypotheses for figuratives;
    this splits me clean; a storm-struck tree; elaborate; gleaming;
    marching in halves like a divorced lord and lady still reaching
    for desire. Or elsewhere entering the fray too late—
    ugh, sundered entire
    so that someone may find me fashionable,
    fascinating, or clotted, in need
    of animating spirit.

    —or I am that genius

    green-brained and overgrown
    no matter where I go I hallucinate,
    escaping bloody-nosed need.
    Regrettably, this mud’s a dream—regrettably,
    spring’s rapidly erasing, making me
    engine of deletion.
    You unrealness, (I turn over) you empty space, you dash from awakening.

Seeing the Cathedrals

It was summer it crept up on me slowly. I kept seeing trees
much larger than most trees; everyone
else who saw them said they were regular sized.
Cathedral-like to me, couldn’t say why
they never stopped going upwards,
curving Gothic architecture and marvelously made
a sound like the first day of school, first fixed
in the mind then forgotten when older. When I realized,
I was walking home very frequently; good for me, also the trains
didn’t run at night; I was broke;
the weather was uncomfortably hot. Once you start
paying attention it’s difficult to stop.
For the two years preceding I pretended my life
was going on elsewhere. Then
I was looking at things. If I could frame it
right the world was in its mystery I thought
a new breeze enchanting ours.
Boughs like a ladder straight upwards Go.
Leaving you at the movie theater, I’d head back uphill, sick
from laughing, the two of us having stumbled
high as kites out of yet another desert flick, armed to the teeth
with our in-jokes, our scaffolding, coding everything,
me always looking at us through someone else’s eyes.
I mean I wanted to see us right. I think transformative
would be the word; looking back,
you were the magnifying glass.

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