Abridged

My arms you say
are just two ideas
stiff as graves.
Then in the fen
a matchstick tip
explodes forever

and you fold
a highway
into a bed to toss

and turn on. Onto
this telephone
pole, downed to

bride-n-groom
the banks, we’ll
glue our shoes

and we’ll glue our
footing inches
from arm’s reach.

Grand Hotel de Londres

I forgot, in the shriek of
clouds, you smoked.
The balcony stars
a naked statue

and the subzero sea
in diamond light
and us fogging want
over cobbles

to flood
the million people
looking up to hail
a huge stone woman—

they think they feel
stars from her granite
form and form and
jolt two fevers alive

and they do, they feel
from their ice tombs
and their diamond
eyes a new pulse.

I didn’t see your face, then
I did, then six years
looped around
our poet blood

and froze it raw.
We are older. The world
brings us to burn
and keeps bringing us.

 

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Julie Doxsee is the Canadian-American author of four books of poetry: What Replaces Us When We Go (forthcoming Black Ocean, 2017), The Next Monsters (Black Ocean, 2013), Objects for a Fog Death (Black Ocean, 2010), and Undersleep (Octopus Books, 2008). She holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Denver (2007) and an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2002).  After several visits to Turkey over the years, in 2007 she moved to Istanbul, where she teaches academic writing, creative writing, and literature courses at Koç University.