Origami Microchap

Twisted Landscapes

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Cover:  The Ember by Lauri Burke

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Bedsheets

I don’t know if I want
To change the bedsheets
They became twisted into landscapes
Blown calderas, which seem too volcanic
So intimidating that you became convinced
We were better off not sleeping
You didn’t even linger
to lie around the fire’s warmth
longer than necessary
And I pulled the magma carpet over me,
just like we’d left it
Wondering whether the hardest part was over
Or flowing under me.
That landscape forms the kind of staircase which
Unwinds and trails down the sides of tenements
In neighbourhoods which have no
space between visits
If I pull these blankets now
Toss them into forts for children
The sheets from last week’s washing
Will smell like any man
you’d find in supermarkets

* 

Drawn Passions

I could never draw her visage
Fast as she drew life from that cigarette
Just hold it like that, like an actress I said,
your enjoyment should be ingenuous,
motionless,
just for this sitting
But she couldn’t stop her life like that,
not even for an instant
She was too passionate, so that
not even trails of smoke
Could hide the contradictory pleasure she took,
A kind of self-centered mystery
How the flame gorged her lips so quickly
Without also burning me, feverishly
struggling to add and remove
the ashen encumbrance
Which made her dark pleasure sensuous 

*

She Left A Vacation Early

Your ticket should have been marketed
As “2 for 1 and 1 for all”
Because when you flew back, I was stranded
Left on the beach, like I’d landed
After following a tail
you’d flicked then abandoned
I wrapped my head with
the earlobes of seashells
Desperate for answers.
The sea life too had left shelters unmanned
Nothing left but the echoes
of a sandblast’s etching
When you dropped our time together,
now frozen in glass
I sleep in the hotel’s other bed
Covered in a fine mix of crying
And sand I collect as
I’m turning things over in my head.
The strangest thing is:
You left a receipt,
As if you hoped that I’d cancel.
Knowing that when we meet again,
At the house I bought for our wedding
You, once again, will be the martyr,
Given that for two more days
I could have sailed the ocean.

* 

Repeat After Me

“I’m leaving you” the email read
In that voice abusers usually hear
automatically
I can’t say I’d missed it
It came back the next day
And said something different
Many times if I’d bothered to print it
Which I didn’t because
The letters take longer to forget
If the light doesn’t catch it
And whisk it onto the internet
Where, luckily, it soon seems repetitive.

*

A Nomad Looks At Fifty

I keep returning home,
no matter where I’m travelling
Maybe this is why people stay
in the most expensive hotels in Paris
The room’s too small, it always will be
The way a zoo enclosure will never be
expansive
And still I stay in it, dissatisfied
despite my expectations
Thinking this is it, this is the answer
Which makes all questions meaningless
This hotel room with a table and a hotplate
Must be the reason for contentment
The way that nomadic tribes
embraced sedentism
And fought to defend gardens
they hadn’t invented
There’s no reason for their sentiment either
Not even lions or housecats stay
in the same place
all season

♦

Dan Gallagher © 2020