Three Poems

by Alessandra Lynch

 

 

mademoiselles d’avignon

 

The one we look at as the one cursed

hangs her orange beast-face, a block for a breast

 

angular, vacant might-be eyes or maybe some shape

screwed to fit the composition of the idea, the abstraction,

the thing,

a smile or simply a slit through which you can draw

your ticket and enter the gate

(I’m afraid, sir, you’ll  find only paint)

 

. . . he was using the vague semblance of women

to turn the century

crude nudes, meat too pink, too undercooked

to eat or flay or were they pre-flayed, tenderized

women dressing their hair, corkscrewed eyes

in the mirror, part-skin, part-stone

oh, but look at those tones!

—fit for the tomb—

a box with limited shadow

so there was limited light

around them

 

 

 

in another country

 

in another country the women are fed and fed by their men till dull

their bellies dragging from room to room

unceasingly fed lest they burn a little off        lest they thin out

their perfect skin obscene as the moon-beyond-full lopsided wheezing

what are they doing growing enormous losing their chins nothing to keep

up no stiff lip mouths swallowed by their own flesh then eyes then nose

then

can’t smell his approach again

 

 

limp river: a dance

 

limp river she was     stretched     among men

& their bend           their garbled hands      stretched her

from stone to stone     ribboned her around

the heron’s leg     propped her

head on a stabbing rock

thrust fistfuls of minnows through her veins

& when they wrung her flesh

to drips     the bank weakly bled

the deer stood around

in stiff registry

the audience clapped

 

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Alessandra Lynch is the author of two collections of poetry,  Sails the Wind Left Behind (Alice James Books) and It was a terrible cloud at twilight (Pleiades Press).  Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, jubilat, Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review and other journals. Alessandra lives near an Indianapolisian canal and teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs at Butler University.