Susanna Kittredge
Two Poems
go vector/go terrible
Poor Brit-Brit, bald-headed,
attacks defenseless cars with her green umbrella arrowhead
indicating direction, the distance of her jog
equal to her magnitude.
The direction of a missile, missing her babies,
Miss Oops-she’s-done-it-now;
thrown way off course,
a hundred violent tangents
to the gin tank.All the little stars –
Mary-Kate, thin as ash, and paler;
Linds, the cat’s got her wrists,
and what ever happened to baby Haley Joel
who saw the dead, the future
distressed and unmoored?
All run to ruin by jet thrust of flash bulb,
corrupt trajectory. They go terrible, raging
off course into the solar inferno.Little lepers, carriers of pathogen fame,
quarantined in a glossy spread, re-infecting
their own selves. What solution?Re-inhabit. Debilitate. Go terrible on
through the flickering screen,
forces to a new path.
We love you get up
above the scandalous rags spreading
tragedy. Leave your umbrellas
at home in clear skies.
Go vector. Go terrible. Be rise.
on disgruntle to westminster
Damned organic urban development, bad as Boston. Only to Trafalgar and I’m
missing the guard, they’ve started. On disgruntle to Westminster – fly, my
buttress! To be on the walk when the clock strikes – One, alas. He says Big Bell
shakes him like a quake but I’m stuck unmoved, moated – nasty traffic circle,
distract me to the impossible square. I believe in tele-transportation, disavow
“subways.” I believe in flying monks above their municipal placards all
unawares, and that our magnets flip, flip – repel, attract, dispel, enact. We fit the
Brits, our signage over-polite, verbose, invisibly indignant.Whose disgruntle is this? Perhaps of the chicken whose breast was breaded into
my bad lunch. Or belongs to the fear of heights striking me between the paws of
a bronze lion, or oceans sore of those driven across them – back and froth, or
rather, sea foam, disappointed mermaids.Light in the grated cloister is still glad and crenellations chiseled in rose and
unicorn. Magpies I know their names, Gargle and Wordless. Chiaroscuro clouds
gearing for Friday’s storm (when cloister will turn verb, discomfort. Rain and an
£8 admission, or else I’d church it. Solitude the third in our triangle.)But let’s stick to Wednesday when sun cut the slatey sky. A hawk-holding
pigeon-stomper back at Trafalgar. Fountain spray ridiculing the surface of my
spectacles but not without, first, drawing a weak rainbow against the light;
drawing a subtle sigh.
