Two Poems

by Kami Enzie

LE VER VERT VA VERS LA VERRE VERTE

     Since one of the most common ways of representing acceptance of the world is human      
     love, that experience is a prominent feature of plays which endorse such acceptance. 

     —Ian Johnston, emeritus professor of English, on Shakespearean comedy 

1.
A lead-plated boat leading up to the tenth line we make.
Morning verses in millions of bricks, looming enormous
above us, like façades. A bunch we want begins.

Wingbeats draw in pastel cartridges a red glow.
The motion matches pants to breaths of pigeons.
A circle on canvas. Afternoon in Beaujolais,
Seelenwecken among marshes; cold cured meats
on 116th. Unperturbed by cash register magic
below, Michael Jackson plays.

The darkness of two shoulder blades provides dimensionality;
through a doorless den carry forth what’s petty without soundtrack.
No labor, nor precedent. Through doorless windows bodies burn
to life against the iron-studded frames.
Daylight arrives painfully intense on towers and battlements
.

2.
I cannot say I knew, when I exited,
the heat of the chapel, frescoes in the early
morning of that day, whether I knew
what my fingerprints represented. In the south, bygone hierarchy.
I hoped to learn something. I beheld
the city; above the tracks, Ubers in the boredom
of midday, rain stereo in heavy stone basins.

Your X groupies bag and gab shit over prepared meals in the station hall.
I pace to and fro your apartment, speak all day to noone else. Lacking
nothing.
     If your glass is dry hold it up, I say.      No wonder, I say.
I had my eyebrows threaded, I say.


3.
And when popsicle buildings
on E. 98th tan like multi-colored
upholstery on sidewalks, and when
rubbed-bare, unglossed windows unlatch
dark like sweat-embossed mouths open
to heat built up for days in my arms sprung
out like a cottonmouth. I am a waterbed inside
a reservoir. Flogged sidewalks, down the
red carpet, hardwood grain perfect for it.
Defending us in the VIP, doing my chickenhead
to drill blast above vibrating metal file
cabinets in the office beneath the
dancefloor. Thinking, at last, the most natural thing
in the world
was, thinking, at last, the most
natural
thing in the world was, thinking, at last,
the most natural thing in the world was Grrah

4.
Undressed in front of the mildewed curtains in my brownstone,
I stand on fours and tens intervals from you with good lunch
wrapped in paper napkins. We can sit on a terrace. Look, up
at me looking over all the world for what’s in coiled hairs
of a supplicant emerging from crow years of doubt,
as if requiring it, blessings, from the last, lonely
person to get out of heaven.

5.
     Still up?

NIGHT MONSTERS ON TENTH AVENUE

I cry the cold North Star to its cloudless acme.
I hang the white beast by its hispid, brilliant nape.
I twirl in LED fragments above ground.
I scrawl ‘Ciel vert pale’ to my brother
then bang my chest. I hover in pale green
skies spying nowhere left. I lose my mind
in down-tuned sludge pumped against flashing
lights. I raise both hands in the air, above
my head. I cruise the frozen parks to find
myself beneath mistletoe. I radio
air traffic control, Tower 4, with nowhere
left for funds. Feathered linemen sit erected
on their perfect hands calling across
the interstate’s pink sodium streetlights. I sleep
for days. Talons fly, flyers on the sidewalk
take flight. My disco ball (it might be over soon)
tessellates paths toward dawn: poached,
captive, or flensed. The past, under dentures
of steel and glass, collects lil’ monsters
in its maw and hurtles to one final formation.

Kami Enzie (he/him), a Vienna-born, New Orleans–raised queer Black writer, is a recent Iowa MFA grad and winner of the poetry contest for the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival. Work appears, or will soon, in Chicago Review, Common Place, The Poetry Review, and swamp pink. (IG/X: @yungwerther)

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