Four Poems by Emma Claire Foley

Valentine’s pastoral

Eros is back
for a new season

his real absolute limits disguised
behind a habit of glass flowers

snow dyed blue
soft soaked toys

a pre-plucked lyre
under a cold tree

acid-color tendrils resignation
to storm drain

to a god called city
& mendicant nature

a rapturous bath of associations
attacks at the border:

it has waited for you
in the lost free space of perfect nature

in the years of making up your mind,
that violent book. I hardly know it

from the limited excerpts
available online

unsure of my place
in the network of glades and sacred groves

I enact the local dances
with academic precision.

at the love parties
I am ruining the backdrops

with innocent exploratory motions,
assuming the shepherd

snapping at the edges of the city
infinitely delaying his homecoming

to stable bride
& in-laws named for trees

wants to be rescued. he leans toward his friend and says:
I got her the second-best brand of forever roses

up to two years. now he’s crying
I can’t save any of these things

flinging himself
at the source of all renewal

the paradigmatic ocean: to accept your spring
you must accept your death

make it make
less sense

imagine my good fortune

live a different life
stuff your mouth with grapes

turn the dials
on the inscrutable first object of inspiration

like America it’s all disturbed surface
a rugged world where everything dropped on the tracks must be rescued

who’s sorry now, they ask in the honky tonks and twilit community centers
and today I have an answer

the fractured symbolic order
where a girl can be so many things in a day

imagine my good fortune



***



when I don’t text you back I feel like a Kennedy
well dressed, as tragic as any American, but more obvious about it

there’s something dismally social about the path of light
a challenging aspect, where I must not imagine myself an animal, no, not today either

I saw disgust through an empty door frame and it was just that
a contentless pearl with no point of entry
held lightly in a reusable shopping bag

yet I’m the brilliant strategist
I’m the one whose job it is to roll the stone in front of the door
who can’t remember what’s middle class and what’s medieval
I am an expert on your personality
yet I can provide no insight on what you—
let finally loose on the unsuspecting city
—will do

welcome to my perfect network of small objects

hello holy terror

thinking of your long lawn
green nothing coming toward me

just your magic
enchanting an area

a sick line of green water
around the outer islands

industrial outbuildings
abandoned juiceless

-

it would be cute
if you found god

and with god walked
from shallow warming oceans

to helpless city center
holding hands

screaming into the light water
meaning joy

-

hello holy terror!
I’d call

from clouded hill
along essential maritime routes

to cozy commercial divot
to sea floor

and—when you had been shot down—
to guard your sleep




Emma Claire Foley's work has been published at Second Factory, the Baffler, Tarpaulin Sky, and elsewhere. She lives in New York.