{"id":439,"date":"2012-09-25T02:00:54","date_gmt":"2012-09-25T02:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sporkpress.com\/poetry\/?p=439"},"modified":"2012-09-25T02:00:54","modified_gmt":"2012-09-25T02:00:54","slug":"3-poems-by-kelly-schirmann","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/2012\/09\/25\/3-poems-by-kelly-schirmann\/","title":{"rendered":"3 Poems by Kelly Schirmann"},"content":{"rendered":"

a new mouth.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the girls were swinging their axes<\/p>\n

at too many things. they coughed, bared<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

their shoulders to one another, to the boys<\/p>\n

up in the cherry-picker, hacking down limbs.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

they parted the dust clouds with their spindlings.<\/p>\n

they needed a shelter for their fumblings<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

they said, calling up into the canopy.<\/p>\n

from above the men sent arms down.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

they built a window and another window<\/p>\n

and a door. outside the girls were faces.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

they came inside and stayed the night,<\/p>\n

rustling in their soft underthings.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the men and the boys stayed up, racked<\/p>\n

cabinets for scraps of hardware. made woods<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

into walls, smoothed the carved hearts<\/p>\n

with a planer. the girls woke up running<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

pale fingers through their own hair. boy<\/p>\n

were they loud. i listened to their whistlings<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

from the treehouse you built me, high up<\/p>\n

on a similar hill. we called out<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

for similar things: more water,<\/p>\n

a new mouth to feed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

______________________________
\nnot asia, exactly.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the country i’ve constructed for you<\/p>\n

is balmy and pale on film.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the woman on the balcony<\/p>\n

has a dark heart & small shoulders.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

she wears a shift of her own devising<\/p>\n

and spreads everything so thin.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the several hundred marks on my face<\/p>\n

arrange themselves in messages.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the air is a stupid pastel<\/p>\n

you smear yourself into over & over.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the woman on the film<\/p>\n

is shaping your dark heart into itself.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

from here every different color<\/p>\n

is a cause for alarm.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the several hundred messages<\/p>\n

make themselves known to me, as mine.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

they make a terrible funnel<\/p>\n

to pour one of us into the other.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

my skin pales and balms<\/p>\n

when i have to remember you up-close:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

a face of my own devising.<\/p>\n

a thin shift in the new weird light.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

______________________________
\nlearned fires.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

i left the forest and came to a marketplace.<\/p>\n

it was bustling there, like a girl scout<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

camp, or hive. i had a few things<\/p>\n

scattered about, here and there, on a quilt.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

mostly they were invisible<\/p>\n

findings, and didn’t fetch their value.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the people too, were invisible<\/p>\n

to one another. there was a parade<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

they lost themselves amongst.<\/p>\n

later i found out it wasn’t a marketplace<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

really — more like a showroom.<\/p>\n

gigantic women passed me by<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

peering. whole families broke me apart.<\/p>\n

i hunched over my gleanings,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

which were only four colors thick<\/p>\n

by then. they became unfamiliar to me.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

i burned them in my learned fires, waking<\/p>\n

to a magic quantifying in my organs.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

i felt my feet growing their arches. i felt<\/p>\n

like a cough growing smaller inside my mouth.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

______________________________
\nkelly schirmann<\/strong>\u00a0 lives it, climbs it, drinks it, wants it, gets it, falls all over it, and gives it away for free in portland oregon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

a new mouth.   the girls were swinging their axes at too many things. they coughed, bared   their shoulders to one another, to the boys up in the cherry-picker, hacking down limbs.   they parted the dust clouds with their spindlings. they needed a shelter for their fumblings   they said, calling up into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2],"tags":[56,57],"class_list":["post-439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-things","tag-kelly-schirman","tag-learned-fires"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}