ALEXIS
    ----------
       ALMEIDA

 

 

 

 

 

I Wanted the Aspen Trees to be Audible

 

There must be a better way
to say this knife is dull.

Better men have done it:
gasped and backed away slowly

like nothing in this room would survive
that kind of dent.

Here, we make that kind of dent.

Here I am a horizontal edge
in the morning

I don't know the business of lunging
in a primary sense

But I know what it is
to vacate a room

To stand inside the weather

and circle beneath
all these miniature thoughts

I leave the poem

unbuttoned for days
and it dies.

Plain statements are made
about death

How we don't laugh enough
at our culinary errors

In the middle of the ceremony,
I ask what is

an elemental condition
Someone hands me an eyelash

Your laughter
announces the entrance
of a leaf

 

 

 

 

Miracle for the other Alexis

 

What if I begin
with what is never here:

a way to fit the glacier
inside the body

a body to hold the body
inside the coat.

Entering is always
breaking something

with a water-logged surface, something living
inside the arm

I have removed my hand
from the poet's hand,

rearranged my facial tendons
and therefore placed myself inside the house.

Poised beside scalloped curtains
I think hello

from the other side of this envelope
what is the color of the Alaskan ocean

I miss knowing you are here.

Breathing is not the specialty
of the dead

speaking in the language
of muscles and drums

I am here, I say,

I am not
but I say I am here,

asking what is the color
of the original question

You remove a finger
to reveal a softer,

much wilder blue.

Alexis Almeida teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado, where she is at work on an MFA in poetry. Her poems, reviews, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Likestarlings, Unsaid, The Volta, Aufgabe, and elsewhere. She lives in Denver.