Two Poems
Read Anna Geisler's poems "Nightingales" and "Looking Down Zakole Street" from Issue 42: Summer 2018 of The Puritan, then check out our poetry contest!
Nightingales
The serving girls argue
who will collect the eggs
from the chicken coop
and from his bed
the master hears them.
The white moon has swung
over the roof and split
open dusk.
It is a dream I am having
more and more and more:
a rooster spits devotions into the sky’s
sleeping throat
then loses his head;
the cows have shed their shadows
under the juniper and slither
into the pastures;
what was dark turns darker
in the sun.
It is a dream I am having
but it is happening now: know,
inside these girls, there are
one thousand others
carrying the peeps
and squawks of every
bird that dared
to snatch a currant
from a thorny bush. They say
the teeth can be a gate-
way to the truth.
Know, inside those girls
there are one
thousand others.
Now here,
through the door—
a crack
in the light. And words
in their mouths.
In the corner
of an unnamed room,
they call
for a piece of fruit.
Looking Down Zakole Street There a streak of people crowds the sidewalk from the pharmacy to the Billiard & Disco, and I stand still, remembering a single shadow I had almost missed; it gnawed itself free from the wall and slid through the grass past the soviet-style low blocks, the iron swings, the bottles in the street and straight into a rabbit hole. Was it a smudge of black, thick smoke or the tattered echo of a dog’s red bark? Was it a baby sun, playing tricks on me? For the longest time, my mind is dusty like an alleyway. It is only when I hear the wall screaming I realize it may be a riot I am remembering, and the next time I do I paint a mural over it, of a crowded city street— there are men, children, dogs and soldiers holding clouds of balloons in their teeth. And two women, unannounced, making their way through the meat of the crowd in the hardened sunlight. One chews a toothpick, one nothing; one of them looks like me, one doesn’t.
Looking Down Zakole Street There a streak of people crowds the sidewalk from the pharmacy to the Billiard & Disco, and I stand still, remembering a single shadow I had almost missed; it gnawed itself free from the wall and slid through the grass past the soviet-style low blocks, the iron swings, the bottles in the street and straight into a rabbit hole. Was it a smudge of black, thick smoke or the tattered echo of a dog’s red bark? Was it a baby sun, playing tricks on me? For the longest time, my mind is dusty like an alleyway. It is only when I hear the wall screaming I realize it may be a riot I am remembering, and the next time I do I paint a mural over it, of a crowded city street— there are men, children, dogs and soldiers holding clouds of balloons in their teeth. And two women, unannounced, making their way through the meat of the crowd in the hardened sunlight. One chews a toothpick, one nothing; one of them looks like me, one doesn’t.
