by Jana Prikryl
each with her cheek resting on the next girl’s shoulder.
They make a centipede of nine heads sloping gently
down from left to right, heads six and seven lowest,
then sloping gently back up to nine. Head five, the center head,
is supported by a dark narrow tie that hangs uncannily straight
like the letter I.
Sibyl
Hello
stranger
Who was it
got away if
you fled here
Bolted straight into the precinct,
congrats
Isn’t there anywhere on earth
No, so
get off a stop
early
In a sense I beat myself there
nightmares saw them clearly
when I was four
Then walked right into it
here, Where do you think you’re
Get off early, walk a little
on the sealed pavements
at an ordinary pace,
your commitment declared
It opens to let you deeper
into it, no knowledge
is safety
Dip
I thought of you then called you, each of us
reclining in our childhood basement then
I came over and your face was smaller
more crowded, not because of the two
pairs of glasses with transparent frames,
the bigger riding on top of the smaller
which I told myself was fine, and you were
taking off your clothes, even the tights
under your jeans which I told myself was fine,
they were sheer, so I tried on the old
feeling of being thrown in the shade
of your vast imagination—you were
knocking small objects out of your ear
with your phone and I did feel, was it
pity—then with you on top I gathered your
sweat in my hands and thought oh, I cannot
do this again, which would hurt you so
didn’t stop you then your mom walked by
like she used to, without judgment,
she turned into the ocean and I thought
as I was waking up I’ll take a dip
Binocular
Hanging there
here, everywhere, the doubles
the overhangs your looking past doubles unless
one eye’s glass
the extras
we know to disregard, unsee
what the second eye adds until and unless we need
it the next
waits for you
but not relaxed, never less
than diligent in its shifting task, and asks nothing but
does depend
on that eye
containing more than glass
which renders it, as warmth, as memory, weightless,
unauthored
matter-of-
factly here leveling with you,
its recorded first-person vernacular selling it as
autofic-
biopic
to eyes one and two, it draws
them in to be together then they give it substance
a change of
circumstance
if anything’s lost by this,
all of it, if it spoke, might name the cost of its wit-
nesslessness
inviting
you to look again toward
that country, never saying if it grants you time
to see it
Friend
Acquaintances not getting very far
until how was it in passing we found
we both at random times, crossing
an avenue with the light or paying
the humane sum with gratuity
for a handmade cup of coffee, become
convinced we’re spying on an alternate
reality, our eyes surviving, while just
behind the moment prior we were
run over or shot, goners with tourist
visas undeserved and hardly know how
we got, but we got it, still got it,
seeing life go on without us
as we walk on calmly to the office.
Sibyl
I made another angry swipe at it
for I’d been told that anger didn’t
put it off, disgust its antipasto, insult
a starch it loaded with various chutneys.
Was only following the script, to amp
that seer’s eyeshadow, when it hit me
as riddles it scribbled on fallen leaves
were tossed up by the hottest breeze
that only a poet would make the tree
oak, those lobes, those tines would hardly fit
a syllable, and felt so close to one
who’d plant such little jokes—an orchard
ripening around the pits—while the seer sits
inside a stone and stuffs her face with it.
Waves
Explosions bigger than houses,
color of fire
in a period camera,
vandals
subversives
chain migrations,
in-
un-
date our expectations,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The following poems were first published in these periodicals: The American Poetry Review: “Vertical,” “Fox,” and “Ambitious,”; The Baffler: “Fulcrum”; Brick: “Jeté”; Critical Quarterly: “Snapshot” and “Snapshot”; Five Dials: “Got” and “Fit”; Granta: “Bob,” “Person,” and “Santo Stefano Rotondo”; Harper’s: “Garden”; The New Republic: “Real”; The Paris Review: “Friend” (“Montaigne was right, without the body’s meddling love”) and “2016”; Poetry: “Asylum,”; Provincetown Arts: “Friend” (“Her voice cut through the talk before I turn”); Raritan: “Prepper”; Subtropics: five of the “Anonymous” poems (“Her hair is parted in the center and this side,” “The whitecaps blink like second thoughts,” “Above these three pairs of dark patent boots,” “Just in front of the porch steps, on a flat stone,” and “Their dated shoes are hidden in a cloud of grasses”); The TLS: “Lady”; The Walrus: “Waves” (“The wind reeled up Broadway kicking a plastic bag”).
This book could not have been written without a fellowship generously provided by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a leave of absence granted by The New York Review of Books.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JANA PRIKRYL is the author of The After Party, which was one of The New York Times’s Best Poetry Books of the Year. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The New York Review of Books, where she is the poetry editor and a senior editor.
Also by Jana Prikryl
“Remarkable…unusually vivid…brilliant and funny…a sensory autobiography that examines tragic material with a friendly scrutiny….Language in this enchanted book sometimes seems to have an independent intelligence.”
—Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
Tim Duggan Books
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br /> Jana Prikryl, No Matter