Kimberly Lyons
BAR BAZAR
Bar Bazar looks shadowy, Spanish, old,
that sort of place passed in a taxicab.
Or is it a small movie theatre.
You think: I’ll return to make sure
but never see it again.
It all happend so fast.
Summoned in thought is a smell and is that a thought.
Old black coats are a headless array.
A library of coats like books lined up.
Each a novel that starts in winter
and ends in late summer.
I wonder if a thought is a place.
The consequences, then, of a thought,
seem to bring us to another place pale as urine shaped like the word aroma.
I bring out of the closet of consciousness a black coat
in dizzy early fall as though rescuing a ghost
and take it to Bar Bazar
for sherry and a cigar
in my other life.
The one I interrupted
when I forgot to write the novel
wandering from place to place
getting in and out of taxicabs.
Discontinuously appearing continuous
in someone else’s coat.
ASTRAL CIGAR
Why does the hand wish to crawl away.
A spider on a mission
to investigate the cylindrical wall
of a pipe that emits ink.
Outside the pipe aqua shadows pool
on broken white plates imprinted with orange and blue sardines
and the letter M
while you, Mr. Spider,
create a web on the cadaver
of the page.
I tell my hand to wait.
To stay like a dog
down but tense
among bricks and a cigar box.
A small hunk from a larger rock’s
healing pink crystal light arrives
unnoticed and spills as it wanders
across the fingers
more directionless than a spider.
A CORTADO
One cortado please is pronounced meaningfully
as nearly the first sentence of the day
after earlier instructions, quieries, admonitions
floated among rooms unheard for the most part.
The day’s beginnings have been hesitant.
One applies letters of the alphabet speculatively.
A Victorian apple tree entwined with leaves.
Consanants jab the air then withdraw leaving a mark.
Where is the sun you may ask dismally
of a glass of coffee.
“Here is your honey” is a compromise
that pours and pours out of the golden glass.
The sun is “there”
blazing above the thick of our subterreanean home which reminds me
of the white umbrella over the face and shoulders of the woman
who spoke to me last night in a dream.
She lies among glossy brocade
that was manufactured in my head.
She asks for a cortado. She stirs it
with a little spoon.
STARFISH
The sun comes in to the room slowly, secretly,
insistently, as a grand hand that
pries open the halves of our mind.
Suddenly you notice that blocks of hot gold
lie on the table and lie on an old chair
embroidered with orange thread
and everything is lit in your mind
as though the chill inside you
this star will
fill with its inferno.
Then everything outside thins
and now the floor is shadowed, a black sea
and my own hand is a leather ochre starfish
that crawls the silver waves.
Trepidatiously, things in the absence are revealed
as the ocean
takes away the skin of the body
and shows us the rock of it.
Kimberly Lyons’ nine books of poetry and chapbooks include Approximately Near (an ebook at Metambesen.org) and Capella (Oread Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in The Prompt Book, Readings in Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology, Quo Anima: Innovation and Spirituality in Contemporary Women’s Poetry and Best American Poetry 2023. Her essay on Mina Loy’s novel Insel was included in A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on the Poet’s Novel. Her poetry and prose have recently appeared in Ten Liugi Co., Spirit Duplicators, The Swan, MiddleLost, Columba, Big Other, Live Mag!, Broadside Portfolio #1 and Blazing Stadium. She lives in Brooklyn where she is editor of “a commodius bee,” a poetry review page on FB.
