Two Poems
by Canaan Morse
Quinine Rant
You see, I’m boiling this salted plum
in purest, distilled idleness
a shallow inch in the mirror
pan – condensed collected drop by drop
from the faces of my antique photographs
hung on antique wallpaper. It boils
like the idea of vodka and the plum swells
from a dessicated, irate memory
into so many affectionate layers
it throws off tissue by tissue, it
unbuttons past the neck. If I drive
more bright bubbles against it
it will unzip at the waist, surrender
to everywhere in its found element.
Heat’s demand chases it around
a round, doorless room, brown
treacle that could dream of ice,
now anguished by the brine inside
sweetness it can’t escape. To be rich
as the sea is deep.
It would immobilize us in amber.
Can you hear it? As I bolt my door
again my lungs already
begin this labor.
Ode to Cold Showers
Audit my protest, my furnace.
What batters the head cold finds the feet warm.
I may be a tortoise living for its shell,
or a hundred thousand octopus eggs feeding
an exhausted mother, but this chrome aperture
underfoot listens to me. I sidle around
the hollow bathroom door at 12:02
for a hushed conference: close the double curtain,
glow and give in. A hex, the healing,
accountable kind. The cold shower sleeps
a half-brain at a time, unfired theater pistol.
In the unlit water closet, with August overhead,
catastrophe and aftermath, the drain
a comforting reminder. When the water
collects over my anklebones,
my charges and overseers asleep, I hear its whispers.
What other liquid would give me
the benefit of the doubt? At 12:08 I deliberate
an extreme course of action, palms on tile.
The curtain suggests I speak.
Canaan Morse is a poet, literary translator, and doctoral scholar of ancient Chinese literature and oral storytelling. His poetry is forthcoming at The Curator; his translations of Chinese literature have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Baffler, Asymptote, and elsewhere; he has also translated two novels for the NYRB Classics series.
