She Contemplates Conception, and Fishing
Sometimes
there is just no better option
than
being hircine and alone, armed
with
an auger, that large white dog
and
iced-over lake. The safe way home
limned
with hoar frost and mercy, loose
screws
in an old chair, the rhythm of parts
aching
together. When they find good
kindling,
a sudden understanding
splinters:
he is heat, singular.
Something
everyone wants to be.
She
pretends not to mind
the
proof he can kiss. He
always
had that need, that needle,
that
hole to mend.
Letter I Wrote Last Night, In the Bathtub
Thinking about Girls Who are Not My Friends
I just wanted to tell you
when you get tired
you can still use my spine
as a rope swing.
Rosary-schmozary.
Customs Form
There’s
nowhere left for us to meet except these echoes
through
space supposed to be taken, seats we bought way back when
we
thought names and sheaths could save us.
I’m
not worried. Someday I’ll recognize you through duty-free perfume
and
say we should have known which walls
were wasp nest. Which hopes
were
very reflective terminals and which were straight up ash. Security
picks
up a piercings by gauge, so somewhere around here alarm runs
long
distance—brass, underwater bells I can’t hear but believe in
with
the sureness of dream. Pulling the drawstrings, I shroud myself
against
the chill that comes each fall, drilling through wool
to
remind me of the last last time I was
warm, tucked against your shoulder.
Dozing
down the barrel of our still-born dawn.
K.B. Thors is the author of
Vulgar Mechanics (Coach House Books) and translator of Kristín Svava
Tómasdóttir’s Stormwarning, nominated for the 2019 PEN Literary Award
for Poetry in Translation and winner of the American Scandinavian Foundation’s
Leif and Inger Sjöberg Prize. She is also the Spanish-English translator of
Soledad Marambio’s Chintungo: The Story of Someone Else. She currently
serves as Translation Editor for Newfound: A Journal of Art & Place,
and is the 2020 CBC/QWF Montréal Writer in Residence.
