Cynthia Sailers
Two Poems
YOU ARE HERE
     this is a title with no poem —Larry Kearney

in my mind, I try to cling to

an object in an object world

there are paintings on the wall,
but I can’t remember them

there is a man sitting in a chair
there is an anonymous man

entering a room.  I think he’s gay
but I try to imagine him

with want for a “careless father”
to be a statue that falls to the floor

while I’m working a library desk
with any distraction to not look
at the globe

he’s laughing at me
while saying, “real space smells like ashes”

you can only see in my face
“a jail is inside of me”

you can only see the job of beauty
is to be dried up or cleaned out

spilling coffee from a cup

there is no child who is that different

a mortal heart because for pleasure
it breaks

so close, to be deaf. it is not my mother’s
tinny voice

we ran around.

but yet, I found a picture of three soldiers
wearing an old, private wardrobe

the town only slightly stirs

from running out of time

to burn my heart or better yet
to get going, imagining your crotch

is just south of here
an ugly black octopus

once thought of as Russia

just wait and see

my lonely pen at the last fencepost
the range that kept me peering at a map

at his knees

I was thinking Atlantic Ocean, I was thinking
air routes to Britain

wherever you are, there you are

burnt out of my heart, a kaleidoscope
or a group of pomegranates,
a group investigation:

“I am told there are people who
do not care for maps, but I find
it hard to believe” (Robert Louis Stevenson)

but in some cases my photographs just didn’t turn out,
and in some cases it was just a bird dripping,
or peeing in the middle of the road.

there would only be souvenirs
stitched by women

or baskets made

maps are already fetishes

for the finished whole, the word “lost”

a forty five day walk
against everything

we could know, what our true position is
in small opinionated maps of the early 90’s

a number of years ago, we have shed
our skin in a thousand different places

now Armenia has made it
with 3 million or so people

the size indicates the number of times

I need to be reminded that there is a boat,
a dress that floats back onto her legs

to make the mind unsettled in a frozen
body

to be a soft cushion of distraction

in a novel about captivity
to identify with those who
are locked into their rooms

being not so beautiful
with one leg spread open
with refusal to float or be flat
against a wall, “without a path”

in my worst behavior

I struggled to arrange an arrangement

where we obey possible scenarios
and nothing’s left
undone, undoing pages
to excuse

men who like to play with dolls

with innocence killing something
now or not that gone

what your wrist wraps around
the delicate tender undershirts

in moist weather

the wars of solo names

to call back in the presence of “hate crippled”
but one cannot hate the one who occupies

a spread so unsettled, so displaced.



A Dictionary of Geography

Nothing will come of nothing
like in Chris Marker’s La Jettée.

They fall against the frozen backdrop
of a city, but find they have a love

soon one day, they’ll discover
an answer to these questions.  Still
not alone with those pornographic
magazines.  Someday you will not
leave me in my historical memory.

Like tragic figures in an isolated mess
hall.  I have a preoccupation for your
many belongings, and notebooks
full of ideas.  A land in order
to cultivate some crops or mock
sun.  Some projections aim

to facilitate fruit trees
on a flat surface map.

It is impossible, however,
to carry a compass around
with you.  There are steppes
over southern U.S.S.R.
that are much more resistant

than those poems you gave to me
about very colorful fish.
Like the famine or female
in the upper photo shown

appeal easily to the five senses.
Agreed with carrying a ruler
around.  Agreed with several
rolls of tape, to guard us against
something like the ice sheets of Greenland.

Normally, some minutes
divided by them like a violent
wind that rises suddenly.  Borrowed
from others near a coastline.

The high tide is higher and the low
tide is lower.  The lower head
often called the copy
below.  Some individual

landscapes easily breaking down
depend on control.  You could
do him like a Siren suffers.

Black and blue the eye
notices the thickness of place to place

The great lakes are an interesting choice.
The grafts that join them should
they jump back onto the train.

What traits do we consider worn?
Hovering above to project
into you.  An ode to salt-water
and colored legal hands.  A thorn
mingling in too much sperm
I could even get turned on by that.

But you can’t have a real relationship
with reality.  You have read
too many books.  Where a film review is
your first memory.

Taking my picture, taking over my picture.
What is not desirable, a messy head
of hair, and worlds and entities
that are worn away by the current
like my ankle below.

return to SHAMPOO 24