Emily Vizzo

Poem for the Sad Dress

When I put myself inside a circle there is circumference & the wonder
is God. He hides beneath a silver clothing rack but I can see

his black shoes beneath the hanging dresses. God knows
I’m hiding too, behind the woolen coats & pricetags.

We want to be felt, but differently. I want to be unfolded
like origami paper or like a navy dress in its perforated gift box. 

God wants to be felt like tissue paper, wrapped
around a new champagne glass. Someone’s hand

reaches for a dress within the rack & finds my body instead. I let
her pet me like a cat. She doesn’t know 

the difference, although my body makes promises
about the softness of promises. God says

Let your body be itself but another woman has already
pulled him from a hanger. His black shoes

dangle helplessly around her neck. God looks
happy. His little fox-face ripens. 

You would think we had something better to do,
but we don’t.

---

Drowning

I was saving myself.
What else could I save?
The surf upturning my ankles.
My face drank light. 

The broad smell of horse above me.
What I could own I packed.
Here again my poverty, riding itself.

Floating is dispossessed.
What is free within me wakeful.
What I want, I want because hunger
dissolves me. Some hollow drinking me.

The dark counting me with its fingers. 

I cannot know whether there is enough. Salt-bridled,
my body keeping surfaces. 

What overcomes me eventually is the water.
Tin fish at my belly. Here I am a magpie,
beaking silk in the nets.

Here is what its death might taste like:
dark mass, drowning animal.

The decision to climb abroad.
My hands in its mane. A brisk net of
stars.

A house of need within.
Knowing no good will come of this.

---

Pyramid

“The pyramids’ perfection became their imperfection.”
— R. Rosen

This morning is a blue
envelope, ungummed
so that I’m a perfect
letter. Turns

out no thieves
removed me
brick by brick in raw
Egyptian wind, nothing
calculated 

in the false maps
staggering my inclines,
nothing cut, nothing
uncut. The inside

outside. Only
the heat, almost
invisible,
pulling stones
away. 

Like a butter
colored lizard
doing push-ups in the
dust, knowing up,
knowing down.

If even a pyramid
can move in opposite
directions, ousting &
objecting to perfection, there
is no chance this alphabet

can save me, no home
in the bright
morning, no safety
in myself. 

 
 
--
Emily Vizzo is a San Diego writer, editor and educator. She currently serves as an AME for Drunken Boat; Vizzo also volunteer with VIDA, Poetry International and Hunger Mountain. She was previously published or is forthcoming in FIELD, The Journal, Jet Fuel Review, The Normal School and North American Review. Last year one of her essays was noted in Best American Essays 2013. She earned her MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and teaches yoga at the University of San Diego.