Two Poems
Emily Trujillo
Pillow, after Francis Ponge
The Romans said pulvinus, as in, little cushion, small pillow. Halfway between two same things, a self-same headrest on which one may rest their head.
Sewn in such a way that it is the same no matter how you mold it, it is only used once. It is really more permanent than the delinquent bedstuffs that it mediates.
In the windows of stores that line the streets, it languishes like white cloth without cloth’s vanity. Still very fresh, and slightly surprised to find itself in unemployment, having been laid aside without rest of rest, it remains a most likable object on whose death we will not dwell for long.
Seeing, after Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
I
A white light with no origin, like a bird, trailing morning dew, as if moving in this way makes me brighter.
Its birth is related to its passing onwards, a viscous, vicious cycle.
Teufelskreis is a word that he would like to write on a white page, curling brightness with darkness, variations, on which a glimpse of the light is the most basic prerequisite.
His brigade of youth and beauty goes forth; a goon squad wreathed in cherry blossoms.
An asterisk in asterisks, turn the page to the bottom, footnotes written in a pale green like new grass.
She couldn’t have watched me seeing beyond the brush.
The writer’s handwriting writes these chimes the bird traces and scatters across the field of reading, churning buttons, errant trinkets, a collection parsed with lights, like a wayward breeze.
Seeing: action in action, pond under branches for nesting doves.
II
The button brigade extends a moment in time like a single glistening feather of passing wind.
Page turns to the flower, which communicates instantly by sight the symbol of interstitial silences, gaps in black and white spider web.
I stand still and still air speaks here still.
Like a twisting branch, an afternoon permeated with pure feeling, she was not interested in the negative space around which touch was not possible.
Observe the songbird whose potency is cultivated possibility.
III
To foster a primordial repository of energy for materialization is the clearest representation of the immaterial energies of repose.
He tells us that he will be swaddled in plumage, pink and blue like an evening ledge.
You look into the other’s face as if you might see the materials from which they were made.
Because it is possible to merge lightness and darkness, a thing that is not quite a metaphor may still exist, as may low-hanging clouds in the morning, afternoon, and night, which are also metaphors for petals which turn inwards.
In order to convince one another, there was a great exodus in the customs of each other’s time to reach the sun, though we also stayed behind to tend the flowers.
A flash of lightning grazes a hawkish eye like a droplet of clear water.
We’re all around, glimpsing each other, looking away, like the flickering quivering twisting quivering backs of birds.
Emily Trujillo studies philosophy and German at Rutgers.
These poems were written in a creative writing course taught by Professor Joanna Fuhrman, who selected them for publication in WHR.