Two Poems by Síle Englert
Diphylleia
Would it be simpler to think of your petals as consistently white or
a thing as benign as rain (which wears rock down, remember), couldn’t
turn them transparent? Now yes mumble something about blood &
water, adages & aphorisms. Or glasswing butterflies. How leaves and
other insects are visible under their wings. Sand isn’t enough armour,
even when you burn it. Have you ever seen the x-ray of a seashell?
Fibonnaci curls spiralling inward on each other. How puffer fish bones
might convince you in a photograph that they intertwine. Think of that
cephalopod teapot with tentacles curled around spout & handle or the
words cephalopod teapot and then in your thoughts turn them crystalline.
Like those disturbing books from when you were small, where the little
vampire rabbit exsanguinates vegetables. Leaves them pale & empty.
Lifeless. You’d have to use words like hyaline & gossamer. On our
lunch break, we realized we could convince a spinach leaf it was human
heart tissue by stripping it of its memories. Vitreous, that’s the other word.
How we persuaded it to beat. Newborn cells clinging to leaf-veins didn’t
know the flesh they made was a window. A ghost shrimp or glass frog,
tortoise shell beetle; those soft sounds, vowels and s’s all coming back
to glass. Not every creature evolves camouflage.
Some of them see right through you.
Darlings of the Apocalypse
sagging hands showed us how to twist the yarn,
a finger dance like this, infinite looping
but the lip-synch grandmother mouth forgot
to say aloud:
it's not the hunt keeping breath and foot falling;
it’s one stitch in front of the other.
our blood-taste
copper tang, long and lost
in forage at the grocery store;
predatory glance at underripe avocados
sift through labels, comparing
synthetic words like exotic leaves
confuses delicacy with poison.
crochet hooks and needles evolve,
understanding themselves as weapons
build an arsenal of warmth
against dark spaces
between brick and home and July;
factories crumble, broken-eyed houses
melting under wanton ivy.
because candlelight can be extinguished
by a small breath.
clinging to the mechanics of alteration,
we teach a chrysalis of clothing
bundled in plastic bags to adapt,
become a blanket or patchwork skirt.
we chew at inadequate warmth,
longing for a sweater or knitted sock
and burn utility poles instead,
felling cylindrical giants from the streets.
we tried to make our own soap between
November’s waltzing snowflakes
gatherers harvested lye from hardware stores,
imported exotic fruit oils and dried herbs.
stirred with wooden spoons and eyes
averted from eddies of acidic steam;
craving the heat spilled from chemical reactions
we ruined our best cooking pot.
which might be only a few steps
from tallow and ashes.
if we could remember yarn-bombing;
warming inanimate objects with war metaphors
we framed a bicycle in rainbows
like crayon drawings
needle-swords and thimble-shields
fought dragons in cave painting illustrations
on restaurant paper tablecloths
left like instructions for when the lights go out.
warmth is decomposing: hair and meat stripped
from creatures we’ve bred to falter when they lose us.
letters blurred on rotting paper,
where grandmother hands kept them safe
we can still decipher loop
and weave and stitch—
there’s time to twist the yarn before
the chirp of crickets swallows us.
Síle Englert is a poet, fiction writer and multidisciplinary artist living in London, Ontario. She is the author of Threadbare (Baseline Press, 2019) and a chapbook forthcoming from Anstruther Press in 2020. Her poetry and short stories have been featured in journals including: The Fiddlehead, Room Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, The /tƐmz/ Review, Freefall, and The Minola Review.