Poems by MTC Cronin in Shampoo Issue 16

They said once I was like you
but I did not know you then
and time is higgledy piggledy
like that and never straight
and never personal when
talked about and always
personal and curved when
lived. So they could see
influence when it was in
fact simple resonance for
some hearts fit quite nicely
when superimposed on
others. And these flowers
blue blue like the throb
of a small bird’s chest and
a shore overtaken by the
flare of the sea. Are they still
growing for you in the terrible
dead life of that joyous death
called youth? Blood you
thought was sweet but only
I am still entangled with the
young – they sound like leaves
still wishing to move in the
aftermath of breeze. So terrible.

Violetta
for Charles Baudelaire

It was the canoness directed
my hand in the self-portrait
She who drew those eyes filled
with spirited swans but wary
of the birds’ escape; flattened
wings holding down the best
years; feathers over my mouth
in a wildly sexual tickle so that
I clamped my lips! Wrap me up
in a bow woman! I’ve ideas about
how you can give me to you: With
audacity, as if I was a dream; with
an introduction by astonishment
so that the stars become again
stars, untranslated; with those
vestigial animal nicknames:
My Wife, My Fleabag, My Halo...
Those days I sat with my back to
the sun imagining children were
the warmest; my garden when night
fell was full of tiny violets that grew
from emptiness. I didn’t pick them
for you; mystery I know in my heart
Preferring always to bandage love
as if it were a blossoming wound