​Alexandra Burack

 
Primrose Hill
 
I could close out my time here, beckon to the summit all my unmade life, addresses mistaken for home. Foreign years spiraled with those in slim New England lanes unwind only in deserts of late middle age; too early for triumph, or even regret. Returned, sparked days that reached their noon over the span of London: seagulls in arpeggioed screech over Queen Anne’s Grove; popped echoes of cricket bats rolled over distant rectangled greens; anonymous grey birds soaring under aviary nets; intricate minor third Beatles’ harmony; the gruff declamation of the music shop ex-pat, doncha know, guitar is in the blood an’ ain’t really learned. I’d feel an old heaviness lift then, wander the hushed-down streets to retrieve all I did not do, yet still doubt that imperatives of words were ever fed by my blood, if any exigency throbbed enough to carve some sluice, some sign other adrift ones would read me by.
 
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In the Wirral
 
Blind Harry daily taps along thick slate to the trolley’s round-about, tunes his ear toward the canal where wharfmen sing gruffly out, slap twined leads to shore. Made redundant from city planning, knew how many went down the sluice, borne to sea from Liverpool, where liver birds swoop to pick drowned men’s bones. Still got me travelling legs, he vows, and turns his good ear out over all Wirral, a place moored enough to drift home to. 
 
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Mr Bleaney's Redemption
 
in response to Philip Larkin’s “Mr Bleaney”
 
Buggering critics, all of them, he hissed, folding The Sun’s Page Three girl over his knee. Floral chintz curtains did, after a while, sort of match the mustard walls, the beige tweed settee. What bloody good's a home if you can't compose your own colour scheme, he questioned the cat as it etched the tea table. Don't people realise interior decorating's an Art, not just pretty bric-a-brac strewn about? The surface of things is only the beginning; take yourself below, through to the grain! There's the whole texture, he insisted to last week’s vests still grey and limp on the back garden clothesline. What's wrong with a romp through the jumble sales just for me jollies? So what if nothing in this grotty box was made after ’68? Can't a man be left on a musty daybed wrapped in some grammy's duvet, finding all that was his life listening to The Beatles? Let me take you down to the off-licence round the corner, buy me weekend shandys, have a good think about that wandering-rose wall-paper, spot-on and safe enough so you can get some sleep.
 
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Iced Coffee at the Diner
 
I’d left the exacto knife and the pills on the bathroom counter. If this is the morning to give up, why not a diner coffee first. Out of habit I’d brought a book of poems by someone more gifted, smart, thinner, and male than I’d ever be. It comforted me that the poems were sweeping in their aesthetic vision, bold experiences I could feel, even in the collapsed mine of my heart. I patted the cover. Good book, I thought, that you are here and I will not be. It is right to step back, let gift instead of effort claim the lineage. I thumbed my paper daybook, jumping ahead to a month that would survive me, and noticed a famous poet I admired would read. Then I pictured the spent lilacs no one would replace at my grandmother’s lichen-frilled grave. So much poetry, so much language can never translate. My iced coffee came in a retro-green fluted glass on a saucer lined with a doily, and a silverplate long-handled spoon. I vowed the last iced coffee; be brave and belt it down black to myself as I bent for the first sip. “Dégueulasse,” I spat, hoping no nearby table understood the French word for “disgusting.” Who can drink this dark bitterness straight? I poured in cream from a dented plastic container whose paper top tore moistly down the middle instead of smoothly off. There’s barely a full teaspoon in these, I raged silently. I emptied five more and stirred until the liquid appeared as soft linen the shade of our kitchen curtains when daddy was still alive. No coffee for me back then since I was only seven. But I’m sure I would have loved the surf of light that swirled into the murky cocoa-black while unmoored buoys of ice cubes fought to still on the surface. When the check came, a sun shower startled the outdoor eaters, who scrambled inside. I left double my usual tip and noticed, on the walk home in the ceasing rain, how plush the drops can feel on parched skin, and decided to stay.
 
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A version of this poem first appeared in Orlando, a single issue mini-zine edited by Naomi Ovrutsky.
 
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Two Dreams on the Theme of Love

Drunk on spiked peach crunch Rupert dreamt the moon lathered up with diamond juices, spilled down the front of Esmé’s purple gown, less like the fall of a dress than the silk shadows drooling across the trees. O frantic light, he cried, smear fast across my sleep, sing the music only love, its thousand floods beneath the skin, could wake. Esmé’s hands languid through her lover’s hair smoothed away the need of shadow. All that delirious autumn they traveled most together when tasting bitter sweat under rusting sky, two simple women scrubbing off the winter smell of death, clean as the silver edge of knife, deep as the cut and just as delicate.
 
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A version of this poem was originally published in CT River Review.
 
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Leaving

The curtain was drawn with that certain seep just short of the end of things, like the way you turned your back to begin the ascent outside our life in this room. We notice, then that cups and chairs and lamps speak in a language beyond the meaning we attach; when cast off, they set to chanting lamentamini, like gnomes in Ereshkigal’s cave, doubling her sorrow.
 
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A version of this poem appeared in Northeast Corridor.
 
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On the Disappearance of William Bradford’s Wife and Other Women
​
“Lost without a trace,” the official comment on Mrs. William Bradford’s disappearance from history. Perhaps overboard on one of her husband’s ships accosted by storm; perhaps run off with a more accessible spouse on the predictable shore; or perhaps took her own life in an English garret at first news Mr. Bradford would sail to the colonies. William Bradford had a wife, Shakespeare, a sister, Michelangelo, a mother. Across all tenses and times absent women: absence of genesis. How can we ever say “In the beginning” and mean it?
 
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A version of this poem was first publish in Invert.
 
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Alexandra Burack, American poet and author of On the Verge, has lived in England and Switzerland, and resides currently in Arizona, USA. Her recent work appeared in The Sewanee Review, Metphrastics, and Bulb Culture Collective, and is forthcoming as an author feature in Ucity Review. She serves as a Poetry Editor for Iron Oak Editions, and a Poetry Reader for The Los Angeles Review, The Adroit Journal, and $ Poetry is Currency. She enjoyed a 45-year career as a college multi-genre creative writing professor, and currently works as a freelance editor, writing coach, and tutor. Her new website is: https://www.alexandraburack.com.