Louise Mathias grew up in England and Los Angeles. She is the author of Lark Apprentice, which was chosen by Brenda Hillman for the New Issues Poetry Prize and published by New Issues Press in 2004. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Triquarterly, Denver Quarterly, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, Pool, and Green Mountains Review. She resides in Long Beach, California, and works as a fundraising consultant.

Locket

At first, I wouldn't believe:
calla lilies dipped in pink, but only the tips,
like a small girls toes, like the bell-curve of crave.
How the clinking of teeth
tastes slightly of antique silver, of April in Denver.

Collared doves I watched in their cage.
How their color is buff, a low lying fog,
the uncertain shore of childhood. But the black

at their necks is so fixed.
Is the adult kohl at my eyes,
is your hair, mink sky around us,
wild & fixed.

first appeared in Perihelion

 

Prone, November

Just your slow, pink movements near the doorway.

If there were fields, they'd long ago rolled back in agate bliss.
Until you were indelible, a dahlia.

Bale of hay, almost made for a woman bent over.
Her pale sweet hedging (which,

in certain landscapes,
is an early form of love. )

I want you slow: birds hover near my waist.

Not sleep in the distance but the mimeograph
of sleep.

Above all else, the trembling resembles a forest.

first appeared in Perihelion

 

Ringlet

While you were busy
qualifying butterflies. Taking the liminal stretch

of each pinked wing. Fawn is a soundtrack for beauty. Wood nymphs,
meadowbrowns, ringlets. Jezebels, parchment, pins.

Outside; the sound of the sun
becoming more of what she was-

the velvet slug of their bodies (Nabokov

said they were girls).

But also, I wanted to tell you
there are winds that you won't own.

There's a file on you, somewhere-

Stiff corridor, this.

 

Louise Mathias Moonday poetry reading

© 2007 Louise Mathias


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