Lisa Isaacson

Before an April Hit:  Same Q

Q:  Winter  frater  furor

                       a concavity

                                   of attic nerve.

Taut, shaded,  deceased

                                    Light in a fit

                                                of snow and brown grasses,

Of of

That containment racket

Thresh before

advent of flail, taunted limb

A:  Deep down mine slag

fragments by hammering,

form skittering fly in a faraway pond

An eating gets let.

People empty

hunger into more people

and people

block.

Q:  Tense water is mine

And dampens your shell as well.

A bower, loud-birded,

Against a surging sea.

A:  I see a claw form and deform

a window.  Fabricate

Bruin.  Dripping bruin.

First aversion:  I see an animal in your window.

You shrug. It feels like

Being clocked. It feels like a game

involving a crawl space.

                        I preferred a darker

appointment slot--the shape of the base of the throat

resembling a horse’s hoof.   To be honest,

There was an anatomical sense before being shifted.

I preferred it when the sun went down during sessions.

Trapped voice boxes. A notch of nightingale. That slot.

Slot: the anatomical sense found in romances and in reference to wounds or blows;

You frequent a game café now, figure into something public and dumb.

Claw shaped condensation

Down the window ran.

I sit at this unscreened city all day.

I mean it, second hand.

We have juice.  I feel responsible.

For your spiritual exhaustion, I feel like a cool wind

Through a useless screen

Unmeshed to suggest more

Jagged brother weather and less insect load,

to suggest both a belly and a boca.

Q:  as wind increases

memory’s bolder firmament

a galaxy pronates,

with some premonitory click, or discomfiture of birds

An ache is simply there, satin facing,

back rough and scratchy, the exercise in contemptus mundi

In habitual transportation

In hostile increase

under guise of robust traffic.

These ghosts around me on your examination

table could form scar tissue.

A:  The clicking noise is only that.

A loud satisfaction, a storm and a window

Suggest I forgot to completely close.

It got just as far as a hidden fee gets.

Upstairs a unit of children

cry in an interruption of sleep.

It unleashes a load of my own

Feelings.

Construction of a building next to yours

Suddenly reaches

Your floor and blocks

not only the sun

I am so deeply inside

and if I could

evade all examination and get hold

of just one lingering ghost

In the cracked and furious everlasting,

Which abideth

There behind me, humerus intact

I would lift, and never let it go

Back into dreams where the certain dead

Relatives or loves eat immoderately, smeared,

and share a garbage of yellow shirts

and painters’ wheat all around.

             When I assume a childlike

              understanding, I imagine a fat robin to post-rain worm.

              I create an aversion.

              That is the largest girl

              invited me to a sleep over.  Annette’s

              room, my face right up to the popcorn texture.

I have a reluctance

And a thick dream finish

I recall upon waking, a reluctance

to step out into the snow

occurring, bright.

Unhem and hemming light.

All wintering fairground

Lethargy in Direct Sunlight, Amnesia, Parent Spirit

I grow inside a large following.

Q:  Is the pavement wet?

A:  If you really think about it,

You understand that what was burning

carries its own deformity straight out of the furnace

In fact, how “childlike”

describes the way in which I

present asymptomatically in a

checkout line.

There is certainly a lack of appeal, call it a narrative tendency, and

Do not be too sure that your desire is unreciprocated.

Eventually, you can say that it all happened so long ago.

It was a personal language, of some sort.

Very abstract, very blue.

This particular elevator capture

Gives me a gut feeling

Of multiple female attentions.

You feel in possession of

all that diffuse girlhood

because our university president

destroyed contexts in which

Actually, her mother is best friends with

And does not consider when sweetening the cake

The final dusting of sugar.

Living in a high rise helps

With its corridors always lit, with

Its outdoor cats

       A. Maybe put a pin in that tense body of water.

Lisa Isaacson has recently returned to the U.S. after holding faculty and administration jobs in English at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi for the past 22 years. She was born and grew up in the U.P. of Wisconsin—Superior and Hurley. Isaacson has published in places that are now closed, like Sulfur, American Letters & Commentary, and apex of the M.  Recent poems are in Colorado Review.