Issue 21: Imogen Cassels

Belles-lettres

after Anne Boyer

*

Poem in the evening, i.e. cluster, i.e. comb, where,

I thought of x, and of the children. Standing in the kitchen with green herbs—my white shirt—  

       all tired un-

Pregnant and unmothered. Paper’s melodrama and hist’ry boys, being onto the raspberries now,

       black honey,

The cheap wrecks out of sight                       [I know it now; voiceover; cough]

Myself somebody else’s owlet / cute, where skates come,

Shooting ice and easy. Sprung knot vs mental snow primroses. x if y; if not-you, me, a slate nest

       of ribs.

Love-writing being here a form of grief, I sing April come she may while stained light and a

       station could. Manchester in the form of a bowl. Hey girl a textured line.

Your being here asif Christmas in July or any,                                            Ferns

“Skyscrapers very like the one they are standing in violently re-stack into themselves and bomb.

       The background these dark figures stand against is blue. A guitar solo comes in,

Dissolving over the brow of the next hill. Faces slept on green against views, a shoulder’s spare

       rosiness and lovely bruises. Our learning we’re nothing alike. To your your foaming roses, or

An opened bird like a couture glove / for a garment against art or at-least hurt. Or hearty

       mimicry in kind of beach stuff’s unsure touching

                                                                                                            To pocket.     It’s a sad miracle.

*

Redstart, aubade osprey; kippers. This sudden, foul luck. In pithy compress. You solid objects.

You are somewhere, likely walking, where there’s a travel beyond reproach, a careful joy in

       curve-lines, the happy metal’s obscure crashing out—

O tiny fur-lined zero, waving, or cactus tree in lieu of lactic tang, here elsewhere.

My clothes I keep close-fitting and too loose, to ghost and cleave to what I have

                                                                                                   Sans love, sans feet.

My life is a pale cube—in any citrus-for-knife swap, that sweet minor zest or the heart is being worn

       to a frazzle, glowing with praise and good kitsch. Mirrors are

Over, I’m vetiver, and lower by day. A cloud-long strain of blue and

       avocado like copper        tongues          You go on existing in sweet irony only

Shoulder bent-back late is all I’d, muscle’s bright woodwork.

I have mended my cheap dress. And gathered my trash. Am absent from felicity, miss it. Some

*

       phantom hemp-oil help, or shrike, another deadfall’s record static,

                or joy in press, reproducing the world.        Anyhow how is it /

                                  where you are?          I’m hungover and it’s raining: my mouth:

       the brightest thing on the street. Solo quickness compound: the light fur

In his armpits like a dog.             Now decay is a form of luxury where love’s put out estranging.

Snuff’s hypocrite noise for a flexor that won’t land. Where is my technic; your plough in   

               triplicate

       green. At correspond to double-fax, here a quick-lure: who we call at in our jointed panic,

Only welling gentle—or holysmoke! this; a props list where I’ll kiss-refuse to meet you, a figure

     up to her neck in fucking ground, lost and without lips or sudden oranges.

Imogen Cassels is the author of Arcades and Mother; beautiful things. Her poems have appared in The White Review, the London Review of Books, CUMULUS, Datableed, and Blackbox Manifold. She's a first year PhD student at Cambridge.

Copyright © 2018 by Imogen Cassels, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.

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