Laurie Blauner

The Unexpected Invisible Woman

No romance. No feral organs.  A thought unravels
against a spiritual landscape, which you can do without.
The woman kneels and was often found kneeling, confessing,
her former flesh smeared in first sunlight.

She’s sentimental at your torn side.  Pins and needles
invade your arm, the moon chews itself into nothing.
The one before her explained how
the body betrays itself.

At the beginning a page became beautiful, choosing
hours, until it, too, was transparent.  The sound of hunger
is a withering balloon.  Sun sleeps in the tiny face of a button.
The woman is dreaming of fauna.

Walls are meant to stop her dresses that don’t
fit anymore. Every day different worlds shiver
in the cold.  The woman, like rain, is continually asking
for something, lost in motion.

Here’s your biblical town, filled with tragedy, infected and
mercenary.  Wind wavers, calls.  A neck snaps upward,
toward all that bright light, and people arrive as detectable 
as happiness or another language.

The woman is a metaphysical disaster.  Clouds urge
her bones to fly, form becomes shape and can’t hold onto anything.
Accidents fall through her. She repeats what she knows until you return,
walk through her, mistaking her for the erratic weather.

Irresistible Suicides

Somewhere the sea goes on & on.
Seeming is believing & I’ve stopped falling

like something smearing downwards,
colors with that faraway look, a bridge

I was meant to explain.  Instead I pause,
poke my life with a stick.  Nothing

is moving.  Everything is yours now. 
Don’t cry.  The world was like that: 

the burned-out lights, empty sky, small betrayals.
My dreams threw me backwards.

I smile into my body, peeling it. 
You could be family or not.  I show you

it doesn’t matter since I won’t see you again.
I like the sound of ripping, breath at my neck,

clouds unraveling darkness.  Somewhere,
in a boat, a woman is hurting herself &

I want to tell her to shut
everything behind her.

Eavesdropping Machine

The unborn divide themselves,
plot their migration.  They expand
haphazardly.  I’m flawed,
missing too many parts. 

I can only hear limited speech,
my hands empty.  I lift them toward
the sky with its suit of clouds.  I wait for
the perfect conversation.  I’m simple, approved

for takeoff in experimental weather.  I’m here and
here and here like music.  I believe in the invisible,
caught between feeling and the moment of
failure.  I record wings and light, noise on

the surface of everything.  The world becomes orchestral
as I break ancestral cogs, gears, wire, glass by mistake.
Large predatory words are used for thunder, sex, love,
death.  I overhear sunrise and sunset and do what I’m asked.

Questions are volleyed between a man and a woman,
who seem familiar.  Their utterances are unable to return
to their indiscreet mouths.  A story unlike any other,
fragments, sentences breaking apart, measuring breath.

I’m close/not close.  I’m contained/loosened.
Vocabulary can be unkind.  I forget their bodies,
which vanish anyway.  The man wants to say
something.  I tell him:  talk here >
The unborn make sounds like remembering.

 

Laurie Blauner is the author of seven books of poetry and four
novels. She has a new poetry book forthcoming in 2021 from FutureCycle
Press.