I have strangled a pineapple
to mute a hard drink,
screamed along
with screeching afternoon light
to meet the devil’s eyes.
I have knocked
my bright, ravenous beak
against a man’s—
in the rearview mirror
our Ferris Wheel limbs.
But today, the January sun
exposes my apathy.
Hazy, undercooked egg,
thin droplets
like preteen bras.
A woman crouches
under a black umbrella, reading
a parking meter.
I crouch on a museum’s brick ledge
like a cat, my knees—
magnified Cheerios.
I exhale
in pencil,
caress tomorrow
covered in chalk dust and hair.
My fingers
a skyline of silvery knives,
my body
a city made of wax
I light at random
until my bones and muscles are a dial tone,
a cool and clean surface others dance angels on
markless.
The day’s orange doesn’t fill out its skin—
sunken in, dried up.
It’s waited too long
for prying fingers
to incise, still-warm blood.
The hours lie
enjambed.
Click here to read Karolina Zapal on the origin of the poem.
Image by Hanna Hatsevich, licensed under CC 2.0.
Karolina Zapal:
This poem, as many of my poems, started as scattered notes in my journal. I took the notes that became this poem on a gloomy day in January 2021 spent wandering around Savannah, Georgia. The sun was trying hard to break through a wall of clouds, I really sensed its effort, which made me think a lot about the numbness and apathy I was feeling that winter, nearly a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, and how my soul was trying to escape that numbness and apathy. The second half of the poem gains its inspiration from a visit that day to the SCAD Museum of Art, specifically the works of Carlos Garaicoa, “A City View from the Table of my House”: cities made from knives, beakers, wax. The apathy I felt made my fingers into knives, cutting everything they touched. Nothing remained. Nothing remained whole. And it built the rest of my body with fragile instruments: glass, wax. I could easily break, could easily melt away.
Karolina Zapal is a poet, prose writer, translator, and author of two books: Notes for Mid-Birth (Inside the Castle) and Polalka (Spuyten Duyvil). She grew up in Poland and often meditates on the Polish language and culture in her work. Her writing has appeared in Adi Magazine, the Rumpus, the Seventh Wave, and others. Her co-translations of Halina Poświatowska’s poetry into English have been published in Circumference, FENCE, the Massachusetts Review, and others and won table//FEAST journal’s inaugural translation prize. A graduate of Naropa University’s MFA in Writing & Poetics, she works at the Mass Center for the Book.
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