In an angle of dictators, in a sea-bass of plates, your mother carries me an egg.
I want to tell her the present tense, but I can only skirt.
Red cloth stiffens by a rim.
Why, when her eyes swim at me like water at carp, I cool open.
The logic of the world says
an entirety of lessons has prepared me for this. Pigeon-flit
of a star’s dark eye—how subversively she fainted
and found arms.
Muscular arms, white stair, cut.
Your mother speaks in an uptilt of tiny girls’ skirts.
She has the same careless manner as you.
like a switchblade
but all gold and light—non-
threatening
like an umbrella, maybe
or that nozzle on my friend K’s water bottle I said
looked like the water man’s specialized dick
in The Shape of Water—
there she is, sitting by an orange window in a café with a
bowl of husked quinoa—talking to someone quite accurately
Tola Sylvan is a poet and translator. Her work can be found in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Poetry, The Common, and other journals.
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