5 poems
from Her Scant State
an inquisitive experimental quality which of the daughters
are you? writing money anything about money in point of fact
inherited a wedge of brown stone
violently
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With folded hands I can only give, as I say, a blank page, a pure white surface
easily, easily crushed. Please tell me. I have no memory.
There was a young girl.
I miss. I like. I’m really. I don’t. I don’t. When the sun goes I go. I wish.
Just a small sound like hands quickly. Kissed.
I’m afraid. I’m only.
The small dark, the clear grey which gave as it opened.
*
the privileges of abundant new dresses kaleidoscopic
the name of the name of a a straight young man
a foolish period of history standing near the lamp
requesting your attention
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I’ve seen poverty’s handshake burst the fact-angry window open and wildest
hurt set up a house.
A very pretty American gaze doesn’t abuse people. “You know that, perfectly,”
still ironic like a brown velvet jacket, like a joke dying hard for a delicate glow
of shame. Many forms—shocked and false and lost—drifted about the house, or
sat in the garden head thrown back, irreclaimable. Indebted suburban hours and
all young lovers listened to the nightingales.
*
nevertheless, he knocked absented, watery
disamericanising desire so very soluble a problem
in the white American light “the banking mystery”
fine ivory surface polished his own fault
Americans’ right limits of primary pleasure
an unthumbed fruit the historic consciousness
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Dear limitation, the illumination was dying.
I waked but was asleep, very much so, and I never arrive at the point, a certain
point—a word I see caught and put into a cage, and letters in absurd pockets.
Words should make mistakes and want no breakfast and live on air, quietly,
coldly.
I do. I go back. I take.
Terrible mouthful.
*
the flatness of exile the fragrance of fruit
in a poor translation
bursts of wildflowers niched in ruin
property of the observed thing
the imagination loving the riot
she’s my _____ she is not his
a sense of property
allowing her two countries with a laugh
as good as summer rain a land of emigration of rescue
a refuge their superfluous population
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Poverties dressed as a face of elation.
*
a little bruise to live with
a shelter a speck I’m afraid you mean
the clock the room
taken ill abusing the sound of
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Small, it was, the continuity of the human. It carried her from the gradations,
confusions of color, the motionless hills. And in spite of. Her, herself, she. And
let her go? Ah. Help her. The boon must be irony.
Barbara Tomash is the author of the poetry collections PRE- (Black Radish 2018), Arboreal (Apogee 2014), The Secret of White (Spuyten Duyvil 2009), Flying in Water, winner of the 2005 Winnow First Poetry Award, and a chapbook, Of Residue (Drop Leaf 2022). Her writing has recently been a finalist for The Dorset Prize, the Colorado Prize, and the Black Box Poetry Prize, and a semi-finalist for the POL Prize, the Tenth Gate Prize, and the Philip Levine Prize. Before her creative interests turned her toward writing she worked extensively as a multimedia artist. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions Online Exclusives, New American Writing, Verse, VOLT, OmniVerse, and numerous other journals. She lives in Berkeley, California, and teaches in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.