My mother tells me not to walk alone
in the forest, so I drop her my location on a pin.
Apples dangle. Trees in Pantone 363.
Shadows schooner fallen copper berries,
& I don’t need to be afraid because
there are so many trees, their lonely branches
reaching out to greet me, full of cambium
& rings. The trees have fallen in love
with the sky
their branches are cracking apart.
Beneath the dark
fractals, an apple rots on a branch. A horse in
a golden field rolls over, crushing blue
gems of dew. The horse the color of
emptiness splits apart. Births another horse.
Skeletal. Chandeliered in iridescence & miming
her mother’s gait. I push a velvet bough
aside, & I return the way I came.
Before He Duct-Taped his Million-Dollar Banana to a Wall, Maurizio Cattelan Made “Daddy, Daddy:”
a primary-colored Pinocchio sculpture, facedown
in the fountain the Guggenheim fountain
fathered by Frank Lloyd Wright. Pinocchio
died because he learned to die
is what being a real boy
means. Moral: Uncertain. Moral:
No moral, just a body,
facedown, in the place where water caves. Today
I ate a 5-inch chocolate cake,
frosted white, edged in red swirls like
seashells, while the dirty side of the lake held
my feet under water. The lake ached for
rain that was not coming. Sometimes
the rain is like that. Sometimes I pray
the snow might stop, that I won’t need to
drive in the darkness while the world falls
whimsically apart. Driving
in a snow squall, I mouthed an Our
Father, a couple Hail Marys, skipping the hour of our
death. For a while, I hid from
the boy-shaped stillness in the fountain Frank Lloyd
Wright fathered. Like Pinocchio, I preferred to lie
facedown.
Lizzy 柯 (Ke) Polishan’s poems appear in Gulf Coast, Passages North, EPOCH, RHINO, Tupelo Quarterly, petrichor., Poet Lore, Rust + Moth, Greensboro Review, Pacifica, and others. She is a Guest Editor at Palette, a Poetry Reader at Psaltery & Lyre, and the Managing Editor at River & South Review. She is the author of A Little Book of Blooms (2020). She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband.
