ELEANOR PAYNTER

In the Envelope   for A.N.

Your letter tasted like a rusty gate.
I walked outside. All along the garden,
purple wings. Of the many
flowers, some slammed shut
at the moon, others rasped open
a shimmer. I only noticed
what reminded me of you, copper
tongue, a beetle round
as quilted sleep. Little airplanes
turned up to night, their engines roaring
as phlox always roars. The streetlamps
wafted. Louder dusk,
thanks to the creaking hinge of my teeth,
but it was just cool enough
to spell your name –



Street Sweeper
Faqma, Iraq

Every once in a while, it still
happens. Outside
the ice cream shop, amidst
bits of cone and paper
scraps, a swathe
of skin. A finger.
Sometimes he pretends
not to notice, sweeps it
away with pistachio-sticky
napkins. But every
so often, spotting
a thumb or index
in the dustbin, he picks
it up between
his own, just
to hold, as if to make
part of this still belong
to someone.



Conversation

Her voice rises from a doorway
on the road that skirts the prison wall.

To reach him, she must breach
the sky. Again she leans against the doorframe,
curls her toes around the stoop.

Her throat hot where it left her.

A soccer ball flies past. Shutters
swing. As if alone, she turns
to no one. As if a secret,
the yard is open from above.

And again: neck taut, lungs squeezed
to wrench it, hurl it, shrill and scorched -
    his name, a lit coal
arched to a seagull on the parapet.

On the other side, four hundred men
watch it drift, wait to catch, and if
he knows, tips his face to let it light
soft on his cheek and extinguish -

her head low, she lets them
splash in the cracks, four hundred
drops at her feet: Here I am! Maria!



The First Tourists

The country they came from creased
the corner of a page. They'd hiked
steep clocks to the cavern of my glass
season, where I'd been sweetening a stagnant
pond of solitude. We sipped
mulled wine, drew pictures
in the air because the few words
we shared had little to do
with happiness. Widespread hands
showed the width of their island, or the lace
of a favorite song. Young, still they reeked
of age. They rolled
r's like fire. I didn’t feel it at first,
but as our fingers traced
stories, sandpaper grained
my ears. They were telling
how they'd met, or how long ago, or maybe
where they thought they'd travel next.
If every taste is a lesson in love, there's a reason
their words echoed milk: The canopied path
of her voice searched for a hiding place.
No one speaks our language, she said
in her scintillating dialect. I might not
go back with him, whispered her long
branches, swinging across
her incomprehensible mouth.