Alexandria Peary
lexandria Peary serves as New Hampshire Poet Laureate. She is the author of nine books, including the poetry collections Control Bird Alt Delete, The Water Draft, Lid to the Shadow, Fall Foliage Called Bathers & Dancers, and, forthcoming in 2021, Battle of Silicon Valley at Daybreak. Her work has received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Slope Editions Book Prize, the Joseph Langland Prize, a Best of New Hampshire, and three Best of the Net nominations. Alex specializes in mindful writing: she is the architect and host of the popular mindful writing webinar at the National Council of Teachers of English as well as the author of Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing and the TEDx talk, “How Mindfulness Can Transform the Way You Write.”
Still Life with a Blue Narrator
who hides behind a cobalt blue water pitcher
b/c an early draft of this poem was done in the ink of melancholy.
Imp, satyr, possibly a cupid or a boy who needs a haircut,
maybe the small woman w/ a mullet who models
for the poem painter in a rent controlled apartment
who hides behind a kitchen table covered in the begonia
of the first-person, third-person geranium
pungency of broken leaves, clippings of phrases
in hard to read shadows and murky water.
The navy first-person witness grows from a tendril teal third person
who hides at the interface of representation and abstraction
in a rent controlled apartment with un-Polish-ed silverware
a survivor’s heap of Old World kitchen gadgets
near a monogrammed bowl of fruit, a tattooed kitten,
total word count in that dish.
Who hides and is followed up by a radiant blast of responsibility, of omniscience:
why aren’t they assuming more of a leadership role?
Why would an adult narrator play hide and seek
or a federal court judge cower in a houseplant forest?
Study for a Portrait No. 1 and No. 6
Is that lava or hunks of cold anger on your lower lip?
Why do gritty tents of her grief end up in my mouth?
Spider trees and wind-eaten ponies, spent bullet casings
or the gold hoops that supported the breathing of others
in front of each tooth like flowers at a curbside memorial.
A fence of toothpicks runs up down the contours of
a reclining landscape, shipwrecked olive trees, vineyard-desert.
I’m noticing… I’m noticing…
****
1. Diptych or triptychs are available at Hotel Francis Bacon
2. Burnt orange or umber rooms in a double or triple
3. Spires of a canopy bed in Room A, a carpet of nails
1. Bullet proof glass box for the defendant on trial
2. For humanity in Room C, pea green, globally warmed
3. I am pressing the “move to cart” & “make purchase” button
2. Oysters couples on platform beds, cow carcass on a crucifix
3. The third room left purposefully blank for Crimes Against
1. Silence is not empty for it doth team in squirming shapes
3. The spires of the cathedral heavily bombed in Room A
1. Near the maw of the bed, the maw of the subject’s mouth
2. To be talking with someone and see their skull like wet shell
2. Subject, verb, object dissolving on the heavy tongue
3. Was this an interrogation or a romance?
1. A muscle left on an oriental carpet, a reflex on the plaid symphony
3. Inspiration from iconography upside down, Cimabue’s Crucifixion
3. For several years I spotted his Francis Bacon torso
3. In the driver’s seat of other cars, at major intersections
3. On the floor in rooms whose doors were closed as I passed
2. A shawl made from pieces of a shroud across shoulders
2. “You bobble head, you dictator”
3. In a ballroom gown of khaki
1. Lure of the expensive sound system… romantic music
2. Hands on e-shopping cart, we should all be on trial
3. Drizzled breeding other / images
1-3. Yet the rooms peeling like an orange, I veer at the last mo
ment