LOVEGRAMMAR

If you are blue, then you are blue.

If I am away, then I can’t come to meet you.

I left through the rathole, where there once

and ever-once was a shut door wanting to slam. 

So when I send a postcard,

I’ll mark it posthaste.  I left through the front,

though I had posterior motives.  Yes the pun’s

the devil’s work, but God made language

let him in.

HOW DOES AN ECOSYSTEM

Watch the broken down TV

in the dark, drink down the dark

malt liquor: it’s nobody’s

fault, we’ve all just stopped

in here, lit as a TV, blooming like tissue

in a trash fire.  While we slept

the leaves fell.  They’re like ads

rain-flat and lettering the ground.

I think we have just enough

time to claim one of these

junk cars and drive away

into the piss-colored sunset,

wings shuddering, gas gauge

dreaming some vapor-dark dream

just beyond the ozone line.

How does an ecosystem sustain. 

Where can I drive to.  What sweet

buds do we have left to pick

my love, my love.

INCOMMUNICATO

i.

I send e-mails.  I send letters.  I frantically dial

the telephone numbers, imagine the contracting ringing, heart-attack red,

angry zigzag of horrorflick noise,

cree-cree-cree, bleary-eyed in the dead of night.

Or I clip articles from the New Yorker, and include them with my letters.

The articles are almost always relevant.

This goes on for months and months.

I never know if my notes make it.  Nobody lets me know.

ii.

In the photo one of them is holding a turnip sliced in half,

holding it by its feathery stems.  The turnip is blistering

sweet from the frost, which came early.  But oh they

are happy.

Then there they are, on the street, with dirty hands.  They are the dirtiest ones

in the picture, which is of a crowd.  Tiny arms aghast,

shrimp-like, these oceanists, smaller than piano keys,

they fill up the whole photo, and still, still nothing.

Niina Pollari is a New Yorker by way of Finland and Florida.  She is also a Finnish-to-English translator, mostly of bearded man poets; in addition, she dabbles in literary criticism, with a soft spot for John Milton and the Early Modern period.  Her work is found or forthcoming in Taiga and At-Large

POETRY