Two Poems by Dawn Lonsinger

Swap

Say what you will about the car-choked
streets, how no one can walk on the sidewalks
because they are covered with cheap goods,

but all I see is how those fake Rolexes flashbulb
the afternoon into elsewhere. Button slogans
face the sky & say some things quietly forever.

Tattered paperbacks warm as lamb’s blood,
and the fast people snagged a little, slowing
down to drink in the set up, wherein conversation

is a bangle bracelet about to. Wherein covenant.
The honey locusts & spray paint are doing
their desperate part. Pretzels traced in salt so big

& stale & unafraid, bringing a little drudged sea
into the city. Taco me a dream & I’ll take it.
Madden the pigeons. With whatever watermelon

you can carry into the alleyways & cube.
Watercolor celebrities & skylines, I hear you,
your cat-like cry for the milk of all eyes upon you.

Knock-offs keep us close, clotted to the wound
of what we want but cannot afford, golden
with sweat and parcel. Barter be unto us:

it’s the sentient sun, kilos of sun, blinding curb-service
sun that vendors up this island. I am
under the influence. We, the walkers & hawkers,

are avatars of light, wingmen of that eternal garden
where we all have split tongues that keep

on splitting

A History

We were too late. The knots of clay & kink
of thorn & prophecy of fur were cleared away & the sun

was already a dividend of glass facades and rearview mirrors.
Between people a line of some sort or another:

grocery line, bottom line, perforation, window sill, the edge
of the bed. Your guess is as good as mine. Between you and me

are 92 blocks, 18 subway entrances, technicolor jungle-print
tablecloths in a dollar store folded into perfect squares

and stacked one on top of the other like prayer books,
kids snaking circles in the waterless fountain while

snowy branches hook around the sky’s bloodless neck.
Between people a line of some sort or another: exit only lane,

exclamation point, barbed wire, zipper, mail slot, trench,
the circumference of your wrist. Between you and me

the problem of fathers, snack packs of applesauce,
the questions of the dead clinging to the wet landscape

of the living, and countless lottery machines curving
tiny numbers like the bones of our inner ears onto slips of paper,

scattered secrets, and an aisle in every hardware store
where assorted compendiums of nails hang suspended like dreams,

beautifully fallow as if they might be spared utility. Between people
a line of some sort or another: deadline, Uber ride, VIP access line, fire

line, hemline, referendum, lip. And above us, chiffon shifts
of swallows unfolding a way out of the infrastructure, but also

above us: the intimations of heaven & our estrangement,
and below the underpaid line cooks & dishwashers, wingless

& sweating. Ours is a ghost story. Ours is a luxury gone
sour and a love gone sweet. Ours are the nameless blooms

we keep calling by made-up names expedient and/or beautiful,
the hydrangeas head-heavy
………………………………………& woozy by the checkout.

dawn lonsinger is the author of Whelm, and her poems and lyric essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Cornell University, a PhD from the University of Utah, and is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Muhlenberg College.