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Larisa SvirskyLarisa Svirsky is a philosophy PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was a finalist for the Erskine J. Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in jubilat, TYPO, Foundry, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere.
W // larisasvirsky.com T // @quasidoxastic |
Answers
My younger self's most distinguishing feature
is her inability to take care of herself
to be somehow larger
than the invisible hand that holds her
that she has only heard about
but never seen
I learned to see death
through my eyelashes
unable to look or to turn away
beheading my beloved in the process
or filling her head with halos and umber
making her heavenly before she is gone
Lately I am sure I am going far away
to start a new life
where no one will ever find me
I will write them letters about letting go
If I let them swallow my absence
with a spoon full of sugar
who goes down for that one
They will only find the letters in the snow
What if there is no direction I am headed
What if everything is always half-lidded
enclosed in not wanting to look
What if I pretended
no one was the author of misfortune
That this pigment looks like earth
because it is earth
and we were buried from the day we were born
is her inability to take care of herself
to be somehow larger
than the invisible hand that holds her
that she has only heard about
but never seen
I learned to see death
through my eyelashes
unable to look or to turn away
beheading my beloved in the process
or filling her head with halos and umber
making her heavenly before she is gone
Lately I am sure I am going far away
to start a new life
where no one will ever find me
I will write them letters about letting go
If I let them swallow my absence
with a spoon full of sugar
who goes down for that one
They will only find the letters in the snow
What if there is no direction I am headed
What if everything is always half-lidded
enclosed in not wanting to look
What if I pretended
no one was the author of misfortune
That this pigment looks like earth
because it is earth
and we were buried from the day we were born
Take Me Home
I watched a man miss the bus
from my car window today
I was stopped on the railroad tracks
which they say not to do
but I was moved by the man in all his arm-waving glory
Apparently finding our consciousness
while trying to catch the streetcar is impossible
or so says a Frenchman I once admired
but am now wary of
When I was younger I tortured myself
out of love for the person I would be
once I supplicated into an empty and deserving urn
fixing meals of steam and sleeplessness
transcending my petitioning humanity
I am embarrassed to want to sound nice
A friend once told me my voice was soothing
and that if philosophy didn’t pan out
I could be a phone sex operator
except that my vocabulary is missing the names of any desires
or their locations
and the only thing I am good at pretending
is the world after annihilation
which in my mind
goes on just as it does now
only better
from my car window today
I was stopped on the railroad tracks
which they say not to do
but I was moved by the man in all his arm-waving glory
Apparently finding our consciousness
while trying to catch the streetcar is impossible
or so says a Frenchman I once admired
but am now wary of
When I was younger I tortured myself
out of love for the person I would be
once I supplicated into an empty and deserving urn
fixing meals of steam and sleeplessness
transcending my petitioning humanity
I am embarrassed to want to sound nice
A friend once told me my voice was soothing
and that if philosophy didn’t pan out
I could be a phone sex operator
except that my vocabulary is missing the names of any desires
or their locations
and the only thing I am good at pretending
is the world after annihilation
which in my mind
goes on just as it does now
only better
