Border Patrol

Do we have
a surprise here.

He showed the candlestick chart.

Cat hydrates.

They won’t let the negative out the country.

Is this the solution
we’ve all been looking for?

Most of human history, rivers,

hernias—worked in a restaurant
decorated with green, plastic crocodiles.

Horned, wan light,
I have data—

it shows the number of horses at each
post station

originally by
a stilts photographer

using his saliva
to pretend he has tears,
licking, folding his head back.

They won’t even let the negative into this country . . .

From my window, I appalled myself
waving to the second story across from

us, 3 o’clock in the morning, dawn,
someone having fallen asleep in the throat
of the television again.

Seven Hens

I didn’t cook anything.

We had the appetite of those hens
on leashes.

Martha bit my cheek then attacked me during Pilates.

Then we embarked upon procedural empathy.

How has heaven done so much for edges.

We had the appetite of video games
filtering through a film of
gossamer consoles

wilting in the tinctures of those seven hens.

But it’s not natural. Nobody wants to apologize.

I didn’t want to fry you
an egg. I wanted to swallow the knife,

I glutted myself to existence,
held fast to this incandescent napkin—

we need it now to tourniquet the daylight.

____

Alex Braslavsky is currently doing graduate work on Polish, Czech, and Russian poetry at Harvard University. She has recent work out, or forthcoming, in The Colorado Review, Conjunctions, and The Columbia Review, among other journals. Her volume of translations of the poetry of Zuzanna Ginczanka appeared this past spring.