by Jana Prikryl
I like ordinary days. To be so accompanied
would be nice once in a while. I like ordinary days.
When friends come by with no real plans I want to get away.
I like ordinary days. I want to be alone so
I can think about my friends. I like ordinary days.
On ordinary days I don’t need to think about things.
Bender
Cruising once in the North Sea
a mail boat sights a defection
off, let us say, the port side.
How long he froze there a mystery.
Medics couldn’t help him.
He wailed Eastern European noise
they held him down. Bilinguals made
no sense of it. Till a chemist
with Cyrillic passing by the sick bay
unfurled it: C2H6O.
Following swigs of elixir, sailor
lived. This found me in a pub in Dublin,
my lady of the delay tactic, where
when it wasn’t raining a very fine mist
gathered under umbrellas.
Coat flung over my knees in that
one-window bedsit I turned
the pages of Moby-Dick, starving
for what flared between Queequeg
and, let us say, Ishmael. They’d done it,
stirred, swaying
wits as well as the mordantly
dry Dubliners, out
of history. Free to dabble in the arts
I’d come to learn about, the
international arts. An Irish decade
and the West all over, was it, makers
manicuring lawns untroubled
for once. Bygones
watering begonias.
I’m just in time to see what beauty is
when it’s at home—oh! shipmates!
on the starboard hand of every woe
there is a sure delight, and higher
the top of that delight, than the bottom
of the woe is deep. For heavy
traffic in that waterway, empathy
is out of order, take the stairs
marked sincere interest, nothing fancy
just an appetite. But then look around
a little. But then bestowing interest
on what interests you,
this is a crime? But then
voracious was a look I loved: Is not
the main-truck higher than the kelson low?
Now in the drink it’s the sermon sticks,
distilled of the wish and then again the wish
it were so. So I swallowed it.
Anonymous
Just in front of the porch steps, on a flat stone
that appears partially tucked under the porch,
a ficus in a clay planter. It produces
strange sounds. The silence that comes dressed
in not the past but conditional tense
may be quietest, it’s endured the most.
Shades
The island trumpets these
feelingly elongated gravestones.
Slabs perforated with windows and workers—
hollow, available,
you can enter any building now—and lunchtime
hypothesized our bodies being one,
partaking of a single bolt
of material much the way the clockwork
symptoms of a virus argue
against your uniqueness, though you groaned
uniquely, did you. Even so
the nature of your relation to chance
was a thing you couldn’t know
unless things were really very
irreversible. And though you couldn’t
you named it, dressed it up or down
oppressed by the depth of your knowledge,
archaeologist
of your own actuarials
in exile. Hearth fires burned in the squares
of windows closed to you all afternoon
till the sun went down into Jersey.
How entitled not to feel nettled
you felt, how lonely, how cozy.
Waves
winking their froth, their whole
body an eye, unhearing, unsmelling,
whitecaps far north as Hell’s Kitchen
At first so far from framing itself
in waves it put a ceiling on itself
at first, but every wall becomes a street
Let it take so many generations, it will seem
a street had been intended all along,
whitecaps winking right and left
Waves the unstable ones, burn up
and fall down, consuming
themselves, theirs the permanence
Candidate
There I was
again in the anteroom waiting for news and saw
he’s not white which did
make me wonder but I wasn’t good enough in every other way
and wasn’t going to tell him
how I felt, which was strongly
and the admission process was hard,
Columbia business degree, after a moment
of reflection I knew the angle my essay would get me in
but not how to deserve him, no
that’s never going to happen
and accepting it’s a solace
in proportion to how much closer it moved me to myself,
almost overlapping
as he shot some kind of javelin into outer space
(nobody else could)
and hit a god (pin the tail on), who got him back in a mortal way
he’d always be needing remedies for
By now he was played by a white actor I’d always found unwatchable
but I liked his resolve, the stoic way
he went every week to buy over-the-counter remedies for his injury
and even said it improved him
to own his own extinction,
it was not at all strange that dying conferred whiteness on him
as they sought a new principal
for the charter school, again
I’m unqualified but my commute is less than expected,
much of it through a park
in midtown, landscaped with gravel walks
and a gradual ascent like an apron all the way to our storefront
apartment with the verdigris bathroom
where an end table forms the vanity,
our child is safe here with us
though they approached me on the train while I pined for him
in an unsuitable place
overlooking an underground atrium.
Murder
To spy on them my calling at three
or four (a cousin down the hall
the informer), small enough to be one
with the back of the sofa, armchair,
the night we all saw (they unaware)
the gray face of a woman
like máma flash on the evening
news forever, its passport size
exploded through the living room,
when was it I gathered that dissolve
was native to them, how long after
I gave myself away in the corner
did the tranquil way they defaced her
come back to me
2016
Trusting no one we brought our first and only
to the party, who�
��d blame us for having
a flattering evening clocking
the imprints of our friends.
Thoughtfulness drew with a huge
compass a circle on the hardwood
so the hole for falling through
would be clean.
Second city of one mind,
the flash which alone
shows everything
so much so that after you close your eyes
the valley lives
whereas those slow good
questions, the visitor leaves going
they know very well what’s coming.
Even things you
set in motion may grab you
from behind in a passage as though you
were part of some larger scheme.
At that time I’d already dreamed
of doing the impossible—
I was a woman at that time—
but the place was a heritage forest.
My hospital gown was elegant,
airy and boxy around my thighs
like a press release and the women in the ward
weren’t saying what they knew.
My bed was the invitation
to balance on a log
near a stalker’s altar and let nothing
of my thighs be exposed.
The damp was material,
greens and browns 3-D as pleats
on mitochondria, each particular
could swallow you.
It’s not that the forest takes your baby
just you might want to avoid
having a baby in the middle of the forest.
The whole world’s full of newborns now
more so than usual, yes,
and mothers saying are you kidding me
including those without children.
Who joins me in asking pardon of this boy
for the year that fetched him in?
Not so fast. If the fault was always here
but hidden, isn’t it best
to have it out?
A figure for this that’s just
does not exist and a hero would cut
a figure so I continue pacing.
Heroism’s safety, I thought and thought.
He is soft, he glows
when I smile, he plants his whole face
in my neck, the locks
of abstraction on visible things collect around him.
From a distance as though it were walking here
the thought grew taller till I saw it
as I held him one morning,
what’ll he do with a bit of strength.
Mud and dust and stuff I can’t describe
push his feeling deeper as he grows.
My memories all feel like news
as if I’ve been good at getting them wrong.
Sibyl
I have a case
If you know the code
you can try it up to three times
thrice her shadow fades in my embrace
and then it’s locked, good luck
I think there’s an Apple on Sixth
you can map it on my phone
if you have a way to verify your picture ID
is yours, you’re fine
They accept three forms of resemblance,
one) bottle of imported wine
two) pair of authentic Levi’s (right size)
three) exit visa
If they also accept resemblance
as a phenomenon, you’ll not
be interned with anyone
who doesn’t speak your language
Prepper
Fine, cruise ships fail to dock
on the Upper West Side, a special sort of hell
takes shape on eighteen decks
when supplies run out, decks
so high off the rock
of the waves the impact
gets them before they get
the chance to drown
and the climbing wall, still there, receptive,
testy as it says it is, gathers dust.
There follow debates over whether
we can drink and who has the right to
the run-off from the genuine skating rink…
To make it paradise you’d wanted
ocean there, everywhere, just
put down, put in its place
with a giddy violence
that then redounds on you
when things go south and that too
you imagine you embrace…Some things,
the philosopher said,
are up to us and others are not.
Since he said so
how the spectrum has stretched, or grown dense
with things.
Up to us are
Now sit and map the probabilities, fire
or ice, you won’t be required to choose.
You want to learn to play both sides
to prove the self, prove that although it partakes
of existence it also exists. Should the western edge
of the Atlantic hold the eastern edge, where France
meets Hungary, may yet do a little dance
of erosion to prove you
among the vineyards and the vicious
impenitent weasels. They like creatures
of the deep within their rows of waves
slithering and silver have every right
to be seen and feared before the waves
crash over them…Fear, you see,
is a kind of love.
It’s all you need.
It’s nothing like this creeper gumming up
the wheels of the Corolla on our private drive,
what the day lights as well as the high beams
make of all roads and all forks in the roads.
Appian Way, autobahn—those folks’
wildest dreams too were escape routes.
But to man the Symphony of the Seas
her eighteen decks alone
with maybe a girl in evening dress waking onboard
that takes vision
Waves
The wind reeled up Broadway kicking a plastic bag
as high as the window cleaners at 57th Street, bringing hands
to lapels as hairdos slapped sideways and up.
Sunlight hit the wind,
wind fell through the light,
and everybody all of a sudden fought to hold a disassembling trapeze.
That night the wind remade itself
and shot down Third Avenue, now a black wind, clearheaded,
soaked with dark water repeatedly and repeatedly wrung out.
To walk up the street was to be rinsed,
to lean into the current and hear
its drowned voices, hear the one voice just stating the obvious.
Bräunerhof
This is a different place,
I had to change it slightly every day
so as to send it out. And then having
saved a few years
I move me
to the places they lived, a pilgrim,
and get no closer yet the hit
(as good as knowing her to think that dad
two or three languages away
was one
when she entered the river, he formed
against the bombs that left her London
houses undone)
is genuine
if temporary.
Even the saying so takes too long
and you turn earlier, arriving
at a neighborhood without the storied cafés
and their patina of dead patrons
whose books outgrow your capacity to love them
or one or two of whose books.
In this neighborhood the cafés unborn
or been and gone (exhilaration at losing
possessions, she wrote, is odd—
the relief—why, you’re freed or
they can’t be lost again?)
leaving sidewalks and solid structures
like buildings, like ruins
that shelter their motives
and won’t say a word to you.
They only loom.
We lost our minds when the crisis came
(the loss a kind of unveiling)
and now to piece together how they’d see it
knits sweaters too small, but we knit them
faithfully distractedly
on the subway and/or watching my shows
knowing they won’t really fit.
When I see you knitting on the B
or drinking in
the hair and interiors
lighting your phone
I give up. I guess
those habits of industry can’t hurt
and what doesn’t hurt you is useless.
Is that not the most gruesome impervious ooze
of the story? that it
it needs to be renewed.
Manhattan
Near the top of the oval portrait
the outline’s ink enlarged
on a piece of privacy,
dropping down to water providing
for unintended trees, the crest
of money’s indifference, undergrowth
at the edge of the city, stray leaves.
The Circle Line plies an O
round the island and roughly a dozen
people agreed to freeze, hunkering
mid-Feb in its low dingy arcade
for my birthday. We rumbled past
this nowhere at large, behind
the backs of the knees
of pale concrete foundations
years ago when I was young.
Jeté
It’s easy to forget
that jetty that viewing
deck where we took boys and
