Photo by Tanne Willow
Sonnet for the Child and Georg
Morning dissolves on me. Georg wears me
like a suit. The smoke from his cigarette staggers
around my face. Georg goes to the Apotheke
to get the bottles filled. He puts a poppy on the wound.
When I was a child, broken because of her sex,
he was the one to care for me. Asleep in the cage
where the ambient light greened, the softer shadow
of the angular young man draped over me: held me.
The climbing insects took a rest to sense the sun.
We remember, wrapped in black ropes that swayed
me, a cradlesong in the embrace of the snake,
our hearts cracked to cast together better.
But nobody can repair fractured ice or shattered sleep.
Yes, Georg and I survive inside the bright wound.
LAKE ANGELA creates at the confluence of poetry and dance languages. She holds a PhD in the intersemiotic translation of Austrian Expressionist poetry into movement and is a medieval mystic and nonhuman. Her books include Organblooms and Words for the Dead from FutureCycle Press, and Scivias Choreomaniae is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil. Her work can be read in River Heron Review, Seneca Review, Portland Review, filling Station, Poetry Salzburg Review, and others.
Read more by Lake Angela
Author’s Website
Poems in Osmosis
Poem in One Art
Poem in Passages North