The Sandman
To bring her sleep, the sandman
must seal her eyelids with
poppy seed gathered in the west,
smear her body with dust,
as if preparing a corpse
for a long voyage.
She who remembers everything
travels through the night
without burial gifts to ease
the discomfort of oblivion.
Mourning is not an arrival,
but rather a displacement,
a recollection of days to come,
devoid of both the solace and the grief
of being inter vivos.
(untitled)
Inside the bathtub I am the reversed
version of an anatomy lesson.
I see plankton in my pubic hair.
The water is quiet.
I keep my screaming inside.
Crowfoot will grow out of me
as soon as I’ll fall asleep.
Dimension
A woman made of clay • without vocal chords • residing on a purple sea. • She said to me, • It’s time 3:47 to go • & the succession of warnings • waves waving • I will meet the one • who is everything I am not • my opposite doppelganger • to know what I am. •• Or, perhaps, the one floating exactly • midway.
House
“Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet
At times, the green door lead to the living room,
at others to the kitchen –
there was no way of knowing.
In the middle landing was a bathroom
and a dream compartment stored behind its walls.
A staircase mislead to the painter’s studio,
the dun bedroom,
and a room he claimed had been there,
then it vanished
(door, and space and, almost, memory).
The December lady quite forgot herself
inside the closet,
then claimed suddenly a last free will.
Five damp windows hardly knew their outside,
when it showed, the view kept altering.
In the ceiling, holes appeared like skylights,
one could climb upstairs and never reach the end.
While the unnoticeable drifting started,
the front garden was signed over
to another time already.
— Alexandra Fössinger is a German/Italian native speaker from Italy. Having lived in Germany, Sweden, and France, she is fluent in several languages; her poems, which she writes mainly in English, often express those multilingual experiences. Her writing has appeared/is forthcoming in Tears in the Fence, morphrog, Wild Court, bind, Mono, and others.