The Largest Island in the Largest Lake on the Largest Island in the Largest Lake on the Largest Island in the Largest Lake in the World/You Parted

By Flower Conroy

The Largest Island in the Largest Lake on the Largest Island in the Largest Lake on the Largest Island in the Largest Lake in the World

Which you is the real you?—the you

behind your eyes or the you behind

mine?  Rains rain.  Thumb lingers at

the lip brushing dirt away.  The phenomena

of:  the boulder in the pond on the island

inside the lake when the lake’s island’s pond

floods, is Lakeception.  Otherly vacant,

having radial arrangement, sculptures

among house ferns & dracaena.  How

many doors in the halls of the everlasting,

how should it be, night-flying silk?  Tinsel

in the garden, spiders in the mind.  Be-

cause it harbors future energy, the tree sheds

itself of leaves seasonally.  Facts are lonely things.

If numbers are ladders & language’s an eye

of a needle feelings try to thread bone

through, let me be spike & rib, rime &

anchor found inside a frozen droplet.

I’ll put on a body of magnetic flux.  I’ll stand

before the dark pulse, I’ll slough through

the slough.  I’ll split into tender.

 

You Parted

in the dream dream-water, carrying in your teeth
a bouquet.  Cutting

out my own heart I am sincere when I say
if you remove

pieces of a machine certain information will be
definitively lost.

None of the clocks here report the right time.
Now I’m never late

or early.  You’ll find you must abandon the dog
inside the idea.

A shadow makes a room vaster with its darkness & gaps
make it impossible

to number the rings of Saturn.  What language
does & undoes & does

not do to reinvent the body.  There’s a name
for the ilium-

shaped mark a cold glass makes on a table
but what do I call

the sweat at the neck at your touch?  The roses in the vase
are mutilated plants on display.

 

 

LGBTQ+ writer and former Key West Poet Laureate, Flower Conroy’s first full-length manuscript, “Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder” was chosen as the winner of the Stevens Manuscript Competition.  She is the Associate Poetry Editor at The Literary Review, and her poetry has appeared in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review and other journals.