By: Stella Hayes
one more night to dismantle like a toy
train
another day to be folded up and put in a
drawer
a continent to put out of sight
another moon to unfill
one more vowel to blot out
from the page
another consonant to render useless
another veil to put over the eyes
a flurry of word-colonies
buzzing like fruit flies
in the ear
the tear duct at the ready
the iris filling up
scenes of you play out
I long to close my eyes
know that you are not in the dark
that I am
that I have my hand in yours
that you have not rubbed me
out with the pink eraser on the back of your pencil
on the page my sentences formed
more of vowels than consonants
hammer at the closed scabs
formed along the way from child to adult
on closer look
they reveal what made them
the removal of childhood
from genesis in one strange country
to the placement in another whose
language is uninflected and dominated by
consonants
my eyes are still closed
a scene supersedes
I see my mother in a handmade cotton
dress
sorting through strawberries
I'm struck by her
we went in the shallow of the forest
to forage for lilies of the valley
the aromas of forest and perfume in my hair
our apartment filled with her
the plaintive boat ride on the pond
filled with large water lilies
do I dare
the scenes of you to unplay
the brain to anchor to anything at all
the water lilies to harvest
the hair to unpin the bed to unmake
to make a stranger of you
Russian-American poet Stella Hayes is the author of poetry collection One Strange Country (What Books Press, forthcoming in 2020). She grew up in an agricultural town outside of Kiev, Ukraine and Los Angeles. She earned a creative writing degree at University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in Prelude, The Indianapolis Review and Spillway, among others.