Paula Cisewski
Night Is a Mirror
Consider the many, many well wishes falling below our wish detectors.
Consider the lumens fleeing in the night
Smoke anything you want. There’s no one to judge
How weird is it that we can never see our own eyes except in reflection and wasn’t
there a moment when that dawned on you, too?
Weren’t you a kid, near the polished steel of the gas station Slushy machine or fixing
your bike chain beneath a wide open sky halfway between someplaces?
Absence isn’t visible. Visibility isn’t presence.
I relish the austerity of my solitude. But when there is everything,
there is everything, even another natural or unnatural disaster, even so many sandwich shops to choose
from, a concept of “self ” seems, at best, comedic.
Consider a whole lifetime of this. But to see the eyes of others!
There’s evidence that even a rainbow can be burdensome, measured in a certain
repetitive way or overemphasized due to someone’s want of color.
Love love love love love love love. Good God!
Consider the currently hypothetical spring buds. It doesn’t matter what time it is. The
great rebirth refuses to be tabled, reshelved, or couched in some birdless loneliness.
Out every window of every house — a blank postcard.
And the present not even threatening to linger.
Look Down Your Own Street
Is now simply some stark
historical canopy to which we
can later refer? Does it threaten
the architecture of love?
Even factoring in fiberglass
and waterslides, motor oil
and lurch, every tiny atom of
your body is a church.
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Paula Cisewski’s second poetry collection, Ghost Fargo, was selected by Franz Wright for the Nightboat Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Upon Arrival (Black Ocean), of the chapbooks How Birds Work and Two Museums, and the co-author, with Mathias Svalina, of Or Else What Asked the Flame. A liberal arts instructor and a Jerome Grant recipient, her poems appear regularly in literary magazines such as A Handsome Journal, H_NGM_N, Forklift, OH, failbetter, We Are So Happy to Know Something, BOMB, and REVOLUTIONesque. She lives in Minneapolis.