red eyes, silver horses
I have to leave
again
Tonight, though
Smuggling truffles out of you by the mouthful
I hold a fist inside my curve
An interrupted gesture of
goodbye
Out dirt windows black sand might be ink
brushing into mangroves
K uses an old man handkerchief
but manages to keep her cool
A few Naproxens and a lie down
I am too tired to remember how to love anyone
Naked in my hotel room I look into the bar across
the road
To see if they see these silver hairs too
But they are busy singing The Horses to one another
And after the 6am gravure tones of grey, sink
down the cliffside in an elevator
Ride the free ferry, cry and cry
and cry
I don’t know how to cry
The riverdrops on my cheeks play the part
At a pinch I take pictures instead
creation lament
you see the vivid in everything
I see the patina behind my eyelids
you sometimes get asthma
my heart plunks out of tune
swamping my arms through
the smoke for the first time
in four days
I open the recycling bin
and it is just an orgy
of humans, ghosts
and cool green glass bottles
all clinking together like music
and I can’t tell if, in all
this, there’s a line missing
a counter-melody or the alto like
some crumbled chicken stuffing
or the cork back in your bottle
that keeps it from going off
I mean a something, an extra
that’s born from me
and must be kept alive
through smoke, through flood
through fear and the whole
fucking trashfire of it all
and while I suck back a
winfield and a wine I can’t
help but wonder if I can’t help
this, or another, or anything
resembling a future anymore
not here, not for some new creature
that doesn’t want its fur all singed
or an underwater home
even though you and I
hold hands when we fall asleep
in a bad mood even
though we could make a firework
out of this furnace even though
creation could be the only thing
I’m good for—what good is creation
just to watch it gasp for life?
just to lose it? I was born
without doubt, knowing change
and floods and drought would come
and now that they’re here
I want to feel hope like a cloud
growing rain in its belly
and the rampant joy
in its wake, but my fear is unbroken
and barren, and barren, and barren
Claire Albrecht was the 2019 Emerging Writers Festival fellow at the State Library of Victoria, and will (COVID willing) be a resident at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, New Mexico in 2020. Her manuscript sediment was shortlisted for the 2018 Subbed In chapbook prize, and her debut chapbook pinky swear launched in 2018.
