Mirages

A house is not a terrapin
                or a sailboat
                or a maelstrom

The sunstorm that swindles
at midweek
sycamore green embossed on the heart
like sequins or worlds

She, she, she twallops
                misrepresents herself
                in foam reflection

What are these schisms we collect
the eggcases disrobing
shedding their tropes

Under the madcap vein –
crags of a moment
batteried, kept from death

So many errors, too few to mention

Papery lint flakes off our chain mail
leaves us
broadcast, truncated, unread

the cherry brood of a hollow sacrament
stretched across some zebra music

according to corners
composed impeccably of themselves
and ideas           of themselves
and us                according to us
insisting on apples and planets.

Afterwar/d

The finger fingers worry
beading presentiment of the coming cold
something April . . .         months away

then/    you do not wait
                to decompose       smolder
                in a lick of chilblains

independent chronologies grieving
one another      needles amok

a log refits itself     into a pine
forest      a field of sunflowers in the Ukraine
an abandoned pear grove

the earth smiles rueful
in her bodice of fatigue

perfect flatness after the heave
diamonds previous or invisible

grave clues
for a comatose superman

then/      you become your father’s daughter.

Body Plates

Eyes

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Tongues

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Jaclyn Piudik @jpiudik is the author of To Suture What Frays (Kelsay Books 2017) and two chapbooks, Of Gazelles Unheard (Beautiful Outlaw 2013) and The Tao of Loathliness (fooliar press 2005/8).  A new chapbook, the corpus undone in the blizzard, is forthcoming from Espresso Chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including New American Writing, Columbia Poetry Review, Barrow Street and Contemporary Verse 2.   She received a New York Times Fellowship for Creative Writing and the Alice M. Sellers Award from the Academy of American Poets. Piudik holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from the City College of New York, as well as a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto.  She hails from New York and currently lives and works in Toronto.

Banner Image and Embedded Variant from “Seeing Stars in Strife at the Beach Series” #1 and 3″ by Robert Frede Kenter Tweets at @frede_kenter