Echo Lake

by Alex Braslavsky

How many fires did you have to chance that night
with the bedridden ghosts flanking my nape.

Open a candle to tear the lit piece out.
Let your circulation help the silo

up onto the landing. Strap a guise lantern,
bending magnet, and abominable

dome for eye, which didn’t drip down, named why.
Hand, like the dirt tail that steadies many.

Flecks in air. Never turn down, as the dime quaffs
of the fount. Open a candle to let

torn piece out. At the edge of the fount my foot
slaps upon ocean’s prancing wave how dare

you. Fires, you were done for! Matchstick’s low profile.
Finding moonpiece, praying for the long fire.

We were on to the derivate dove’s wildings.
The lip goeth circle, on your thigh’s shed

of brushstroke. The mammoth folds up her easel.
Her sleeping cap billowing on the roll

of lovehandle. That pops up with fluffmark.
How does? How does even a canary? How does?

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Alex Braslavsky is a poet, scholar, and translator working towards her doctorate at Harvard and working on Polish, Czech, and Russian poetry. She is the translator of On Centaurs & Other Poems (World Poetry Books, 2023) by Zuzanna Ginczanka. Her poems appear in The Columbia Review, Conjunctions, Colorado Review, and more.

Photo by Sippakorn Yamkasikorn on Pexels.com..

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