Lindsay Illich

Ariel

In the dream, instead of lady parts
down there, I had a Bundt cake—​
 
slightly burned, dusted with confectioner’s
sugar, but more obviously, its hole.
 
When I was young I was stupid.
I thought I was good for what I didn’t

do. I’ve made a life of appearances.
You were here. I have the cave

left where we hollowed
out the pumpkin flesh,

our spoons clicking. And that was
some light. It, too, is a kind of
 
throat. The reason why people
make Bundt cakes is about increasing
 
surface area so that everybody
gets some crust. Design being the first
 
accommodation. Why does obvious
have to be a bad thing? The thing
 
is defined by absence. And you
aren’t here. 

---

Description of an Abandoned Silver Mine

Full well, I knew: eyebrows from the couch,
a couplet of cinema. Remember on the train,
 
the men in orange robes, the clean cut
tonsure, the younger one reading on his tablet.

Wanting is terrible. I knew full well
standing at the kitchen sink.

Some directors have a way of expressing
musculature through light. Time is an optic.
 
From on high, pools of runoff, amber
on the shore, dark in the middle.
 
An immense and tragic beauty complete
with smelting piles and books we carried
 
loose in our arms like children.
You knew full well the water
 
piped in like music was boring.
It’s stunning the depths we go to,
 
the carotid, conditions we negotiate
for an understanding: ores
 
and eithers, glittering among the coffee grounds,
in the elaborate filing and folding, towels
 
and trowels, vowels and vocatives, standing
at the mouth, wholesome and reckoning.
 
I want out and want in at the same time.

--
Lindsay Illich is the author of Heteroglossia (Anchor and Plume, 2016), Rile & Heave (Texas Review Press, 2017), which won the Texas Review Press Breakout Prize in Poetry, and Fingerspell (Black Lawrence Press, forthcoming 2020).