Category: Alessandra Lynch

by Alessandra Lynch

fanged root begins to snake—

in three sharp thrusts

I rout out a stub

toss it on a dry heap of yellow sticks

somewhat weakened

Once ravenous

in the bed

my arms crept up hung from the iron

frame Pull me out

I cried

to no one my husband gone where he was

my family melting away

and I

attached as a root to blight

or to what is

invasive O honeysuckle

O pretty and sweet

The hollow stems crowding out

light O soundless plague of the forest

Imagine somebody whispers

stopping that cycle imagine you

being the one

I lay abed my spikes softening unwitnessed

mouth adrift missing

a petal

Heave out each inch of bindweed

and what is left A hole

too vast to be a hole

god-gutted space within the earth

nothing to push against impossible

to envision There what could be living

I go into the kitchen for water I await my friend

who has for years worked

his family garden

He who is kind

regards the root and starts

to dig—

from Pretty TripwireFind more by Alessandra Lynch at the library

Copyright © 2021 Alessandra Lynch
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Alessandra Lynch

I.

Only the child’s shovel will do—

neon-green, simple

maple handle.

Behind barberry and cottonwood, I am private, tucking

the bird into snow, far

from the house

that killed it when it veered out of its orbit.

Later I’ll clean the shovel with yellow

fluid, smelling bright as nails.

II.

After the bird dropped with a thud,

I wanted to work my fingers through the freezing feathers,

coax the wings to fan out,

its thumb-sized heart too rapidly beating,

bleary eye half-open,

but there was no touching it.

At night, my child presses his cheek hard against mine,

his ribs against mine

till we’re doubly pulsing.

The wind’s a small unbidden sound,

not grieving.

III.

I could have waited for the fox to lick

the bird’s eye closed, nudge its weight from

my doorstep, then streak off,

carrying the bird in its mouth

over the fields

to where it belonged.

I could have studied the crenulations

of the bird’s underwing or sketched

with a charcoal stick its fine head. Or burned

the bird to a teaspoon of ash and scattered it

over the lake.

IV.

Once I could hold someone

else’s love so patiently,

distantly, you could hardly

tell it was me loving.

V.

I have cried I have not cried enough

I have ignored the compass

fractured the map with blindness

while the worms

died in the earth they kept making

I have cried I have not cried enough

I blanketed my child

before he could think to cover himself

I thinned myself as though I were a project

I blot out grief as snow does light

I pass through mirrors—

VI.

the last day of february and the barberry and snowbirds

and surveyors’ little orange and yellow flags flittering

my armor shiny bits of my helmet in pieces we are in pieces one

feathery piece of us dropped and I have been talking

so much god has vanished my words a little something to bring

to a party

VII.

Beautiful fractal—

bird with a blur for an eye, what did you

see before plummeting?—shadow wavering

at the threshold, glommed

by light.

Later—the shock

of snow you slid into

from my green shovel—the chilly

distances

between branches where you might have perched

and twitched. Under mulberry trees sacked in white ash,

how handsome in your death-suit,

sealed clean—

VIII.

In spring, it rains and rains

and the water rises

from the drainage ditch, carrying

pitch and froth and mud and melting

snow and sodden feather-sack,

the water spilling over

the bank, over the creeping things, the ivy,

snagging what it hauls itself over, dragging

the bulk toward my house…pulling everything

unburied

closer to me, circling my ankles, insistently lapping….

from Pretty TripwireFind more by Alessandra Lynch at the library

Copyright © 2021 Alessandra Lynch
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Alessandra Lynch

Someone got her clit cut

Someone blindered her

led her into the pit

to keep her clit unlit

Keep it clipped

shut

slit

No pleasure now

No meow

Keep it a spit in the dark keep it dark

Keep it safe stuffed keep it so it had enough

Keep it writ

unwrit

Sit without it

Tie back the lobe

Dog screel keen

Keep her on the mark make her the mark

marketable

Make her market

Table her

Mongrel who done her in

Mongrel

and a twisted yellow rag mongering of it

What a butterfly what a lie to dare

write about her as though she is

a flower

from Daylily Called it a Dangerous MomentFind more by Alessandra Lynch at the library

Copyright © 2017 Alessandra Lynch
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Alessandra Lynch

i will cut off all my hair and use each strand

as another bar of music each bird an unbridled note

i want the dark birds they’re more easily read

they can use my hair as nesting threads

you have said you won’t love me without

my woman power—what protects—my veil

i say: my burden—what strangles—dead tendrils

of pleasing pleasing appeasing

follicles which have no sheen or motion

i sit on my hellish yellow chair without my hair shirt

in my man’s suit and small man’s shoes my legs wide

like a man’s smoke issuing from fingers

immaterial green bird in my lap

from Daylily Called it a Dangerous MomentFind more by Alessandra Lynch at the library

Copyright © 2017 Alessandra Lynch
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Alessandra Lynch

~

The girl was born with one

watchful eye

that could keep the village safe.

It was her sole purpose.

The eye witnessed a mother

sliding under

ice, her children

three small stumps

frozen on the river’s edge,

the father slumped in shadows,

a rope around his neck.

What good was all that seeing

when she had no way

to tell it? Look at her eye now—

bitter, furious flower

infested by bees & flies.

Look at it

looking away.

~

For the fast I purchased three quarts

of juice. I’d be thin as a ruse.

A week of nothing

but Orange/Apple/Prune.

My system would be

clean. O gleaming discipline.

The scanter I became,

the greedier I got

for less.

~

Allotment: one square

of light & a half-crust & grapeskin

for vitamins

Is that enough to leave a trail, to get back?

sufficient to keep me

walking to the room

where the scale waited

I could live on a bead—

shiny or dull—

and not collapse

Let the empty swings sway

Let streetlights dim

Let the wind and mousy-haired rain and even the sun eat away at me

~

That large rectangular restaurant window,

steam in the glass, wide tables,

grandmother & grandfather

from distant mesas and buttes sitting with me

eating as though we’d just seen a ballet.

It was cold enough to be Christmas.

The spruce & scarlet globes hanging

& everything shimmering. My grandmother looking

directly at me. She’s thin. My grandfather glancing up.

Strewn between us: handfuls of shatter & tinsel & tin

& meat & things I would never eat—

~

It was there they gutted earth

to lay two black tracks that couldn’t touch.

There, the train. There, my seat by the window

where I sat on a real square of light—

tissue-sized. I felt my bones clear

as an X-ray, their starry knobs, the hard

weft and slope. With the first jolt

of the car, they thrummed.

Half my weight dropped, loose

flesh lost, I was getting close to the marrow,

claiming my landscape—

the spectacular hill-bone of my wrist rising

as I turned in my ticket, my knee bulging

larger than my thigh.

The train lurched, its one yellow eye

fixed north where my mother waited

and would, for the first time, see me as I was.

~

Not eating was a sign

of grief

in our house: after he & he & he left,

my mother stunned

thin as a rake, draped

in her wedding veil, bruised eye

staring out,

her sisters dusting every corner,

refrigerator stark

& sponged.

In my bed, I froze,

coiled with snakes, wet with piss. Mouth

stuffed with a fist

lest someone hear—

~

I was a gaunt circus horse practicing my getaway—

running for hours in circles

in the training gym

around wires & nets & shovels for shit—.

Slashing at my forelegs,

one of those circus barb-hooks.

I rounded the next bend, windblown mane, ankles grinding

to gristlebone.

~

It’s a quick trick:

Sink into the box—

the mustachioed man

(jacket-tails flicked back, slick hair)

saws through you slowly…

then it’s rising time. Shake off the bone-flecks—you’re

halved, a lean miracle!

~

I slept in a house of hexagons,

the boxes we didn’t unpack complicated

with twine & string & flaps—

It was a house of emergency exits,

no door. You had to be really thin

to make it out.

~

I fashioned a small snow-girl with one eye.

Caped in an icy sheen, snow-father leaned

off to the side, two brothers heaped like ghosts

unable to protect themselves from the sun,

snow-mother losing her figure

after the blizzard, trickling underground.

All winter their mouths filled

and dissolved. Sometimes as they melted,

they sunk under a headdress of starlings

and sparrows, twigs loosening from their sides,

eyes disappearing, small whitish-gray sockets

replacing them. I stared in vain

as though in my looking I could

save what was made to be

undone.

~

Once I so loved

the tiny pink-tulled ballerina

in the music box,

I cut her off at the feet.

Poor stiff girl, perpetually

en pointe and lamed, toppling every time I tried

to twirl her

in my palm

while the stage whirled

without her…the tinkly music slowing to a drawl and slur….

~

I thought I could make it out by tunneling

through dirt, pushing

my star-snout through, leaving

a wake of spider-bits,

root-sprawl,

& the horrified faces of my family

standing at the mouth

of the hole.

They couldn’t fit within

what I’d made, & I had no space

in there to turn back

to them.

I tunneled away

from houses, people,

flowers, birds…the hole

narrowing, my hands & body

falling into a rhythm

of my own

making.

~

I circled, circled the campus—Where’s

the carcass, the feast?—greedy for the fat

double digits of the scale I stood upon….

I leaned hard into a book…words—my breath,

my light—blurring

in a dark wash of ink.

Farewell, meadow & stoplight—

Farewell, starfruit—

A collarbone in every poem I wrote.

Wedged between grocery shelves & bins

of loose bulk, I couldn’t choose a morsel.

At nineteen, reverent

& ashamed, I emptied a box of laxatives nightly—then drank

a syrup that would heave my guts up

through the throat.

Who is that figure? What is

her name?

~

The people were so hungry they ate

dark plate after plate

of what I fed them—

without complaint—even

asking for more….Too heavy, too heavy they hissed,

when I picked up a fork.

~

I lowered the blinds, sat

in the lack—

diminished, slack, grotesque—

just a body in the dark relieved

of its reaching, free

of its brain, its heart.

All mine I whispered

to the swelling empire

of emptiness—

~

The hand-that-was-mine

took a reflex-

hammer to the hard knot of knee—.

No kick.

Pliers quietly undid

the wires of Appetite.

A donkey’s head in a cage

brayed & brayed. A test

of endurance not

to drop everything & save it.

The world was fixed as a crumb

on the tongue.

The stethoscope a pendulum

dangling—

steal a scalpel, pare more

flesh. Drape

another sweater over

your summer bones….

~

Is that a boy or a girl

the child asked her mother while looking at me

I became absolutely perfectly silver in that

moment

I turned sideways I

vanished

~

What was I

that I chose not to float

that I lay thick with mollusks

my mouth filling

with algae I neither swallowed

nor spat

that I chose not to eat

like an animal

sickened on the salt of upheaval

I believed

each ounce I weighed

had an equivalent

grief

or was I human—

gagging what was

salvageable

I made a god—

annihilation—

I offered her bones

& she ate nothing

but fire fire

& whatever wind it was

that failed in that moment

to lift me

from the dark

strangle of weed

and push an oar

toward me

~

Remember the days of no

calendar no

future—relying on

the thin quavery finger

of the scale to settle

on a low stolid number

maybe 80

or 70—

concave enough to hold the real

jewel! To be glimmering pure and null….

In a blur of dream,

I imagined 60—the needle

trembling leftwardly, lower—a near invisible stinger

hovering

clean, sharp—decided

in its angle—one last

shudder to the left—

~

How did you make it back?

asks the stone lion I pressed my body against

before blacking out—

asks the forking wisteria of my mother’s forest

where I retched repeatedly after eating—

asks the sealed book I lay against

whose blood, scorching inside

with a life I shrank from, was my blood—

How did you make it back? echoes the last glass

of milk I didn’t drink.

~

At the hospital’s check-in desk, they took my name. My mother

trembled, the nurse handing me

the yellow wrist ID for the children’s ward.

you don’t have to

do this you knowmy mother cried you don’t have to

go inside we can

go home what do you want to do

Looking away from her, I turned

down the shining corridor on my pin-thin legs,

past the medics in green, the silver IV machines, tubes

& sacs swaying—

I carried my bag into the room.

~

Thank you for the cherries I wrote

my father, my throat still too thick

to swallow sweet bits, the girl

in the hospital bed beside me scowling

at my gift. The next day the whole basket

vanished. The girl brooded, skin

marked up where she had tried to cut

herself open. They pulled me back

for what? She looked my way. Nobody

gives a shit about me. Nobody

visited her side those months, while mine surged

with people & flowers & chocolate

I couldn’t eat—have it, have at it I said

but she took only one, watching me warily,

calling me Skinny as I folded myself up on the sill looking out

at brick & alleyway, dumpster & anemic

yellow trees.

On the day she tried to kill me,

her hands scarred rough & tight around

my neck, hissing threats, I hoarsely

issued reasons for her to stop. I spoke with the calm

of one who knows herself. But you don’t even want

to live she cried, dropping her hands,

& I took my first full breath.

~

The women are trooping over hills, through

fields & rivers. They splinter as they stride, narrow

between trees & sparkling. Their eyes harder

than glass, than bone. Women trooping, brushing

against railings & mirrors, you would think their elbows

could cut through iron & glass, but iron & glass are

smarting their calves & thighs & necks & lips.

Even the rain is on parade—delicately tinkling

& cutting the women ever-so-lightly as they troop & thin

en masse over bits of glass & diamonds & caulk, bearing

gleaming compacts & glass jars of chalk. A glimmering

glass set—. How brightly the women thin in the gloss—

poised, swallowed by dumb reflective

surfaces with a sheen that stuns—.

(O Shining Epidemic!)

When the sun

drops low & the women lie safely

abed, their skin covered by glittering gauze,

their hard eyes focus solely

on themselves as things that need

thinning, weapons that will harm.

~

In deep green spring—

skeletal, draped

in thick shawls, full sleeves,

in my emaciation—

kneeling in sweet grass,

I was sealed, almost holy, cloistered

from men, from women.

I had made myself

genderless.

Lovers sailed past,

arm-in-arm, ample with flowers, I smelled the largeness

of their skin, felt their hands, their lips…

a bird inside me

widened its beak—

from Pretty TripwireFind more by Alessandra Lynch at the library

Copyright © 2021 Alessandra Lynch
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Alessandra Lynch

On a small hill grew a bullhorn rose.

It was making no pronouncements.

—

Beyond the hooded moon, the stars would not

unleash their light. My fingers

cold with summer could not button

my shirt. The fingers had been

imperiled. Jinxed.

—

No curtains hung

between where it happened and hadn’t. The man

I worked with looked at me,

shrewd. He’d seen

my dull face. His neck veins

tightened. He flipped

something grill-wise, said

I’ll kill him.

—

The absent-me wrung out

a rag, turning away from the sink,

away from the wall, flat

as a hand pressed over a mouth.

—It was air that had forced me down,

pinned me, heaved till I

became little of a self

with a little thought:

Check for blood regardless.

—

Flat in parking lot dirt I turned

for orientation, eye to eye

with something glinty—rim misshapen,

half-sunk metal. I could be

alive

only to flowers and birds,

the stricken

fields and fields and fields of them.

The human?

(could he be a he—a being—what he

did—undid—

what could be only

un-being)

—

Like air: memory

Memory: like air

I walk through and

disappear

—

It hangs and hangs and hangs—

not bell, not noose.

A case of walking paralysis.

A case of can’t-report.

—

Glance

at the shack, the tree. Nothing

looks back.

Knife-I-am-ready-

to-pull, are you ready

to gleam

in the lot

where I could not

scream?

Shock me past

the blacking out.

Shock me awake—

speak for the mouth-that-was-mine,

for the voice, triple-strapped

in its jacket, marching on.

from Daylily Called it a Dangerous MomentFind more by Alessandra Lynch at the library

Copyright © 2017 Alessandra Lynch
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Alessandra Lynch

I.

Daughter-I did-not-have, come

to the colony collapse

in our backyard—wasps

crawling in slow gold

demented arcs over the hive half-

glued to the branch,

not eating any more, not building

their home.

Move closer—the bewildered wasps don’t break

from their parade….

And there’s the brother-you-did-not-have:

bolting joyfully across

the grass yelling about kites—.

Life there! Life! And craving…

our wasps keep looping, making

nothing of themselves.

II.

…remember tumbling out

in ruddy clots & strings

& rubbery approximations…

This time, last autumn.

A mouth a pinch of dust

could stuff.

III.

Daughter undone. Daughter who wasn’t:

I bank with other

fish, flattening one cheek

against the mud, turning the other

to the glistening air.

My one dark eye

discolors, shrivels to a speck.

IV.

Open the cabinet door—no plates, no cups—

but on one shelf: little footsteps in the dust—

a child has walked through hungry—

follow her—

is she in the storeroom beyond the blowing curtain

or in the unlit corner

where piles and piles

of petals

are stacked unevenly—

—turn with me quickly—

is that fish, bird, flower creaking around us?

—keep moving—it’s possible she’s just up

ahead.

V.

Inside her room the shadows are stuck.

She recites her nightmares

in the half-dark: mother

walking bewildered through the pieces, draped

in a bedsheet,

a mountain

porcupine spitting its tiny arrows black

as rice into my hands—

my grandmother holding an empty tray,

my grandfather slurping his soup.

She opens

the calendar, sees dust

in the boxes, x-marks through everything.

VI.

It was hard to be

tender, harder still

to find her mouth, to get her

to speak. As though she were a doll. Easier for me

to dissolve. Poof! Now we’re just the circling

dust. Spinning off—what’s

to trust

but Quiet: here it is in its best

suit. Pacing,

awaiting our arrival, its mouth

full of flowers—

its wedding with Unsayable & Unsaid,

my constant suitors.

VII.

I am floating by, cloud for a face, pieces

of child folded into squares inside my body—

VIII.

my son says I did not hit

I did not bite I did not throw

the boy who did that is far away

in another land I’m a fireman

a working man an artist

it is the other you’re after

that one doesn’t speak your language

that one has a sister

IX.

At a particular time the baby ended. You ended.

There was no calendar for it, no mark.

Morning was dark in the hospital parking lot

when they took you—to where? I wish I’d asked. I wish

they’d given me a sack of you—a thumb-sack I could stroke

& carry in my watch-pocket.

When, in the moth-green gown, I looked

up from the strapdown, seconds after being sunk,

I asked: Are you sure she’s dead? If so, can you tell me

why? The staff looked down. They had

no face for it, but the blunt doctor

paused at the door, before walking out.

X.

Once I went mean-mouthed,

spat out: I wouldn’t have had

a her—. Not

in this ring, this pandemonium,

these cutdowns, these pried-open-

by-razors, the flatirons, the dumbing

bells, the straight-bed circus, the parade of flat mirrors,

not a her: fast-ditched, cinched

wrung out, roped.

I was afraid she’d be twinned. Afraid she’d be

mouthless. Afraid she’d not hunger. Afraid she’d

be halved. Afraid I’d tie myself around her, un-

willing to release either of us—

XI.

Little girl I could not love

because you ended

before you had a voice or ears to hear me,

I give you this armful of autumn, the flyaway

leaves, tumblerfuls of scarlet, the shimmering

tangerine bouquets in the branches & the cleaning wind

in lieu of the dark tight shoe of the mind, its

useless narrow

grief.

XII.

She chides me

for calling her little calling her girl

was not even a thumb-whorl I she cries

The leaves this time

last autumn

were bloody streaks of gold

She is the soft part of drapes I am looking through

she is the rain

that lashes away from this lashes at that

XIII.

Sometimes she is patient—sometimes she hands me

a stack of the day’s sufferings:

a vexation of arrows, a concave sky

& a tray of split violets & the mouth of a river & the blood’s litany,

or she offers me the mirror with its reminders:

my beautiful mercurial children, steady-eyed husband,

a few windows with light, sparrows….

She says she prefers not

to be my wagon

or my weight. She says kindly

I am not to talk to her again.

from Pretty TripwireFind more by Alessandra Lynch at the library

Copyright © 2021 Alessandra Lynch
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Alessandra Lynch

was really a shack.

In four steps, you could back out into the lot

and its smoky light. In two steps, cut

through the mechanical whir

of the strobe. The slam-slam hiss.

Ice thinning in its glass.

One squat toilet in the stall—

yellowmouthed—under light too dim

for you to discern blood from dirt.

You were there to lose yourself. There

from loneliness, for love of dancing. You said

you felt safe in the center

of the strobe, a manic flower,

petals whirling so fast

they could disintegrate.

They always played your song, and when you

climbed the steps to the DJ in his corner, how tiny he was

behind bulletproof glass, turning

knobs, adjusting the bass. Dull beat-boom-thud.

You tapped, said I’m sorry and looked out at the floor,

unwieldy with humans.

Before you made your request, the DJ began

crying: Are you clean, are you clean? Nobody’s clean—all my friends

in the pit, needles and smoke, all my friends gone

dirty, all gone. You’re not clean.

Can’t be. Still you stared at his face, asked for Prince,

and returned the next night—severed

purple and gold and green by the strobe—

intent on dancing hard

till the man got littler, littler till

the club-light fizzles, till there is only the outside

air that will not rise above

zero.

from Daylily Called it a Dangerous MomentFind more by Alessandra Lynch at the library

Copyright © 2017 Alessandra Lynch
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Alessandra Lynch

I’m walking through petals beside

a child waving a stick

that looks like a wolf. He’s not afraid.

He’s singing about garbage men

who lug swollen bags away. He’s singing

about knives, how we shouldn’t

hold them till we’re old. Why

even then?

There is a space

between him and me—a space,

not a chasm—

not too wide for our crossing—.

from Daylily Called it a Dangerous MomentFind more by Alessandra Lynch at the library

Copyright © 2017 Alessandra Lynch
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.