ROOM POEM
If you are holy put your fist in
Your mouth when asked how
You really feel skirting through a forest
And through a house mostly I was
Transporting a torch
For an obscene animal it had this
Thing for lips
O your lips on my
O those lips like it had
This thing for skin
O your skin like a child’s
Your skin so soft like it had
This thing for legs
O your legs
Your thick legs
But there were only commonalities
At its center and qualifiers
The inability to specify when it was placed
In the land of female abundance
I hefted a torch across state lines and lines
In the mind that crisscross love
And its potential liminality
I carried a torch for a specific position
In the projections shot from
The animal’s mind
When I put the torch down
It just went pfffffft
I held on for a while
Took it for an extension of my arm
Stumped in the wet grass
It’s all the same
There wasn’t a light left on
For me in the animal’s rooms to begin with
It didn’t leave on a light for me
Always a door cracked slightly open
Always only edges only the fleet of
Fur under a finger only the saliva
Under bare feet to be found
Some of us have to put our hands on
Things to understand them some of us
Have to move through them
Come out an other side
DREAM POEM
Last night I had a dream in
Which my feeling for someone was a very small dog
Smaller than a teacup dog
It died in my hands
How it injured itself was by running too
Fast down a stairwell and its leash
Let out all the way and it either hung itself
Or smashed its head against a wall
It was still
Pawing the air when I picked it up
Either way it stopped
So last night I had a dream in
Which my feeling for someone was a very small dog
Can we talk about that
I couldn’t find a vet while it was
Dying
And it just died in my cupped hands
I needed someone
To relieve me of its stiff body I could not
Seem to relieve my own hands of its stiff
Body I remember looking down at the dog
Corpse at one point and thinking
It seems taxidermied already won’t someone just
Take this off my hands a lot of people
Offered to help
But I guess it just wasn’t the right time
My fingers wouldn’t unclench
Hardened around the hard body
Of the dog who began to feel like ice
Somewhere in the awake night
In an undisclosed location it began
To snow over the blackened ocean
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Dara Cerv lives and writes in Jamaica Plain, MA. Poems appear or are forthcoming in The Volta, apt, Jellyfish, and Whiskey Island. Sixth Finch will publish her first chapbook in the spring of 2015.