As flowers in the bathtub
Trees on the subway
A garden in a closet
A locust in a backpack
Security guards in the woods
Octopi in a bunker
A wife on a fern
A birdhouse, look, in the lake
A speech bubble alone
You bump into ectopia
The newspaper deliveryman’s car being towed
this morning. Bigger wrecks a body at a time. Stalled
I will be going out of the house, its consciousness
of privacy and tools into the ecology of broadening out—
the people to run into, the cars to consider, anything
can happen once I leave the house. The sunlit cars
with children are backing out.
With neon-yellow liquid in the syringe
“Assume the position,” she says.
My johnny’s freewheeling.
“Did you meet the doctor tall
and handsome?” the nurse asks.
Easy on the eyes, I don’t say.
Why am I the one to tell her
who’s been here? After the nurse
double gloves, I keep tracing
the lighter skin below her eyes
where a shadow could be. I can’t find
the space between explicitness and
escape. After a chemotherapeutic shot
to dissolve the sprout I spam a little
sick and foul. Pricked
with sadness I’ll stink up affection
with a mix of oblivion and whimsy.
The medics circle through.
If and in soured.
This ultrasonic yolk sac blur
a bunk settler, a spark subsidiary.
I am a spore
of disbelief tongue out
tipsy on ether
gathering how and when
its shores
to wash away
each morning a slot
filled with ancillary forms
all of them I signed.
Cheryl Clark Vermeulen’s poems and translations have appeared in Caketrain, Jubilat, Third Coast, Split Rock Review, TWO LINES Online, DIAGRAM, EOAGH, among others, and the anthology Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico. She is the author of the chapbook Dead-Eye Spring (Cy Gist Press) and a finalist recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Artist Fellowship. Cheryl received an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, after working for a decade in non-profit organizations. She is Assistant Poetry Editor for Pangryus, and teaches at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
