forthcoming from Crisis Chronicles Press, 2017

Krysia Jopek

With every line one broke off a bit of the world  —Rainer Maria Rilke

Hourglass Studies by Krysia Jopek — cover
Crisis Chronicles Press (forthcoming, Nov. 2017)
Cover design by Dale Houstman

V

1.  Autumn carries winter in her lap, Orpheo looking back for a one-act reckoning to decorate      shifting      spheres.

2.  So many choices, glosses, ways of seeing       invisible      coat-strings weighing down.  

3.  Vitriolic images unfold sound, impinged fractions pierce tiny welcome.

4.  With each piece of evidence, the outcome purported, existential information to appease the most stubborn philosophers, oblivious to the demands of Monday [unable to tie one shoe].

5.  Hibernation promised for the skeleton laying down unattended, separated from history.

6.  Someone convinces we were needed in that house where sorrow slips in on a Saturday, accordians the stairs.  

7.  The voices of children coming home from school coax a language of follow.  A curriculum of cymbals.

8.  One dead white bird disintegrates on the pavement and is not a metaphor.  Nor a quantity [echo].

9.  The boy knew his multiplication tables up to nine. 

10.  We’ll miss your furrowed forehead, moon, your delicate   papier-maché.

11.  Yes, I raised pigeons in black and white where the river missed ______________ ; please have lunch without.

12.  Tell the girl she’ll need more armor; kindness a cloud—her hair, a pillow-curse.

VII

1.  Every night from the subway the clock’s dark hands pointing to locate a portion of the whole and make it recurrent, [re]marked.  

2.  A variation of the same variables.  

3.  Names can be changed, change can be given, wind can push light objects through the street.

4.  If the snow would come as the almanac promised, perhaps the illusion of starting over, keeping the record clean, all of those dark marks [re]moved.  

5.  Tongues purified, the worst memories recede temporarily: a sudden turning: undefiant nominalism: a skirting of the issue.

6.  Sacrifice calls the negation of desire, postponement of the infinite.  The crack viles were hidden.  I did touch you but I froze.

7.  Unsure footsteps on the pavement promise a stranger carrying a silver tray of moon.  [He is late but there is no other, and to assume so undercuts his bounty].

8.  The smile signed mischievously, as if an El Greco or a life of pure poetry.

9.  Repeatedly, expectations swept out of the house: the prince-madrigal kindness, use before dark.  Fire escapes ready, numbers posted in case of emergency.  

10.  The elephant glowing, assembled for the sick child alone at the escarpment.   

11.  To eradicate the sickness pull up from the roots, coddle in an uncompromising way.  The fragmented parable instills value of the [im]material, green dust in fingertips.   

12.  Orpheo at the cliffs gathers the ruffles of sun.  Torrential downpour and thunder [deco]rate sleep to tell of the [s]hip, the [t]rain, the waiting to be carried [a book] under someone’s arm.

VIII

1.  What is wished has dire beckonings.  The Bedouins move in.  There is no method to explain that funk.   

2.  Misled through careless wreckage, the fools play dead.

3.  Because of all those movies, they came here, fumbled.  To be fully on guard; appendages, functional.

4.  Alabaster women with seaweed hair watch over because someone wanted some form of begin. 

5.  Racing his new bike, the boy pleads for infinity, dreaming pipe dreams, his father’s thick hands grasping him at the collar.

6.  The good boy in the fable broke his leg and had to stay in the castle for many days; his best friend staring at him from across the shore soon forgets.  Solitude overwhelming, the sea's steady voice.

7.  Curious at the old cemetery, a whole set of problems can't be etched into the tree's thick trunk, transcribed with linen paper; side to side, skipping backwards through the hurricane.

8.  The bus of strangers passes    achingly    somehow familiar  resembling those missed most in sleep.

9.  One and another joined by a rusted hinge, like an object, subjected to scrutiny: a forensic investigation replete with graph- paper crib sheets, wake up, be alert but not too nervous the time will be up, nowhere to go. 

10.  Energy and dissipation [acedia’s dissertation] undo eternity’s fence.  To be near another is no guarantor.

11.  We are happier ever since they took the BMW away.  No third party is needed for the argument that cannot be proven outside of the set.  

12.  Time remains one-sided.  All winter the gardener weeps under ice.

Krysia Jopek

Krysia Jopek’s poems have appeared in The Great Literary Magazine, Crisis Chronicles Cyber Litmag, Gone Lawn 19, Split Rock Review, The Woven Tale Press, Columbia Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Phoebe, Murmurs, Windhover, and Artists & Influence. She has written reviews of poetry for the American Book Review and a review of literary criticism for The Wallace Stevens Journal. Maps and Shadows, her first novel (Aquila Polonica 2010), won a Silver Benjamin Franklin award in 2011 in the category of Historical Fiction. The Glass House of Forgetting, her second novel (literary fiction) is forthcoming as well as her full-length book of poetry, The Island Within. She founded Diaphanous Press, which publishes DIAPHANOUS: a biannual online journal of literary and visual art and books of poetry and fiction.

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