3. A war between brown and grey:
Trapped in this mean-glare city, we
long for a million November browns,
the intertwining of bare-limbed branches that
go on farther than we can imagine. We count
the hills in our mind, hills that flared in subtle
reds in September, now fallen to smoky hues.
The farms we drove past: silos and evergreens,
neatly ridged soil littered with broken stalks. We
find it hypnotic, this visual death. It comforts us—
a kind of death that’s always moving, sinking
with the rotten scent of wet leaves. A soothing
loneliness, not like
this city-loneliness, where six million pairs of
eyes press upon us, tear at us, make us part
of the living dead.
4. This she knows: she has a rabbit’s heartbeat,
and cannot play with wolves, although she might
someday. She knows that cold feels wilder than heat;
it speaks of tundra dreams and endless light.
If she could swallow down that light, like raven,
give birth to herself—a truly trickster hare
she would be. But she lives very low and craven,
and cannot reach the sun for such a dare.
With tricks like that, she’d earn a wolf ’s respect.
In her heart a wolf is all she wants to be—
his fierce nobility and beauty, spun
from a loyal nature, is the lofty tree
her rabbit’s heart takes courage from. For now
she waits and watches, tapping her beat on a bough
5. Apples rot to cider below the trees,
you couldn’t catch that sick fruit
now oozing syrup for the wasps and bees.
Cooking fires send smoke along the breeze—
You’ll gladly coat your face in soot
while apples rot to cider below the trees.
He enters you, each kiss a new disease.
Rocking you, he leaves you mute;
you ooze syrup for the wasps and bees.
How blank-eyed whoring comes with steady ease—
your gift to men: a body to pollute.
Apples are rotting cider below the trees.
Each precious wound proves a tender tease
Making degradation your pursuit,
to be the oozing syrup for wasps and bees.
A choice was made to live upon your knees,
to scoop up withered, wasting fruit:
the apples rot to cider below the trees,
oozing syrup for the wasps and bees.
6. How sentimentally capable we
are, when I become the receptacle
of your unseemly, vague desires; I
don’t mind—you taught me how to light, with grace
and dexterity, a cigarette. I learned
the rest from men with bony wrists, long fingers.
Now I am creating several diseases
in honor of you; we will shut the light
together, we are kindred states of grief.
The world requires us to lie by sweet
and tormenting discretion; I play along
but confess all to you; your pain is honest,
so you must break away for the good of those
around you.
7. And I live in a warm little den
where the floor is too hard or my
feet are too soft. I don’t mean soft,
I mean the flow of blood in me
has learned a new dance and
I’ve not been informed. It
makes me suitably weak, to
walk a room from one wall
to the other. Think on it: to feel
is not to be. Out of necessity
we must care for one another,
even if only the body will
look after the soul or soul after body,
a closed circle of nourishment stretching on into the borderlands…
8. What you notice: is certainly your
god is the searchlight sore throat, your theft,
you see through the trees styrofoam cups, and
mass graves
sondheim playing
in the get-away car the way you cannot concentrate
you’re sorry-grateful god doesn’t live in a house
regretful-happy but in the beams
of an a-line roof,
the may bough, from which,
a green mantle, and one night,
bowls of porridge you pushed off
and flew.
as much as
rough monk robes,
the simple swirl of a fish
but god isn’t god at all,
9. Dreaming in sterile white or with all clay
thoughts, wet and unfired. And why
does the beating within reflect the wind, a place
to rest, the freedom to break down, out, clean.
If you licked electrical sockets the way
you lick your knife, I wouldn’t need to lie
to you, you who lie with the sweetest face
(wiry grace) that a boy has ever seen.
After four black nights, crooked roads, lay
down your attic-junk self, your yellowed-lace
mind. Sleep in western fist-fulls of sky.
Who doesn’t anticipate the smell of blood?
10. by three am it all collides
and pools out of the mouth
of my shadow self—bleached-
blonde, twenty-two, cannot sleep—
to be free of the painful cause
of suffering
hell is an eternal waiting room,
learned through careful study,
wounds of war, a raging yawn.
in this deathly cardboard box
I feel the hunger to forget again—
only there is nothing here but me
and the girl crying out:
if I was not happy, I was satisfied
11. will not give
you my diabetic sugar,
take this rubbery roll
I sit mesmerized at
the dementia mouth, hear its soft
mush words in my sleep.
hear rape stories
from down the hall
find a boy in my shower.
tie at Scrabble with the
mentally incapacitated.
I love the
manic man
until he calls me princess
and I run to catch
12. a calm breath. cannot
be seen crying.
I sink into
rosy fingertips on
the bay,
I am still
here
I am here
still more than a buoy—
sick of sliding
on the grime
in skidless socks.
13.
14. Christina Lachman is a recent graduate of Pratt Institutes BFA Writing
Program, where she studied fiction and poetry. She contributed poetry
regularly to the schools literary magazine, Ubiquitous, wrote media
reviews for various websites, and interned at Belladonna*, a reading
series and small press for feminist avant-garde poetry. She is cur-
rently working on a speculative fiction novel while shuttling between
Manhattan and Upstate New York. This is her first chapbook.
Visit www.ChristinaLachman.com on the web
or e-mail: ThisBrutalFall@ChristinaLachman.com for additional
publications or to find out about new releases.
Printed in U.S.A.
