Two Poems
by Sylvia Gindick
Heliomorph / Didn’t See One Bird Today
Found a feather in my notebook
so I made a collage.
The feather, marred and bent,
jammed into a red mouth
with a tongue of pavement.
We were swans once.
White plumage, black masks,
hazards of orange
at the mouth of a river dammed
with Tupperware, car parts.
Each day the count rises.
Isolation tightens, click or sting,
then a beat, caesura,
to arrest the risk of eruption.
When the dam broke (we knew it would)
we stole fire from swerve,
rupture, and hinge,
made our way wing-to-wing
and cut thoroughly.
Touch is gone and the social
easier to understand—
needs over wants.
It’s the long return to the new
and I have plenty of time
to wait.
Methane and Heat
Orange smog saturates the sky,
pregnant with methane and heat.
When I move, the cars follow,
white eyes lusting after coal
like the crazed mare. Smoke
fattens from a manhole, some
other holy ghost, embraces
the road, its skeletal shrubbery,
ascends to graffiti that says
something about going viral.
Trade the sun for a flood, I write
before boarding an aluminum
tube that smells of burnt rubber.
My shadowed arm is the color
of ash and red berry. A baby’s
crying face is glued in place
next to its mannequin father.
An eternal plane will never
land—find, restore, recover it.
Your prayers will go unheard.
Your math will stutter at the sight
of it. The sun will slip into the Pacific
and I will never die. I run back
through the airport and drive with
the heat on high. I drive for miles,
sweating, not taking a sip of water,
all the way to my childhood home.
Three weeks later, the fire comes,
swallows my house on stilts, spits
its ashes into a sea of cellophane.
Sylvia Gindick is a poet based in NYC. Her words have appeared in BOMB Magazine, Bookforum, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications.
