Pansy Maurer-Alvarez
from LEGEND OF THE WINTER TRIP (VI)
A fist shakes a mental shelter
Rings force a crucifix
On forefingers gripped
And singed with memorized
Rumors sliced open fresh
Sinisterly soft
from LEGEND OF THE WINTER TRIP (IX)
Beauty and humanity
Shaking the trusted stillness
And the reach of dogma
The seed unable in the night air
Proceed to water and blood
Stain the backs of arrivals
And engrave the remaining
Waves with winter glint
Knowledge is immune silk
Moist with shaking sores
Unable to breathe beneath
The ocean’s emanating circuits
The faceless chimes dim
And unfasten their grasp
O medical despair console
This entrance efface the night
from LEGEND OF THE WINTER TRIP (XI)
Phobias stem no longer
From false dilation or the
Wrong book in the next city
Red plastic lies in November
An emergency
Beautifully arranged in half
Cries wait with open grins
Children in the identi-
Fication mirror system
Grace lost demanding
A ring round precise manners
from LEGEND OF THE WINTER TRIP (XV)
Gored to starvation
Réticent l’espace
Boardroom lounge play along
The harm of bodies in cloth
All along the conference table
Ground to distraction
Any place leaves Venice alone
Too golden to subscribe to
The emperor is siphoning off the teachers
Of oneself to say impotent
With a bank balance a ballot a smile
Impotent to smile important
Enough reveal roots transitions unreal
Retrieving desire broken off
The shape of a photo
Today’s uncompleted pleasure
A stranded poem in the procession
A pocket remark differentiates
A complicated dream capable
Of whatever stepped massive trance
Copyright © Pansy Maurer-Alvarez 2017
Pansy Maurer-Alvarez was born in Puerto Rico, grew up in Pennsylvania and completed 11 years of literary studies at universities in the US, Spain and Switzerland. She now lives and writes full-time in France. Her latest books of poetry are Oranges in January (KFS Press, 2016) and In a Form of Suspension (corrupt press, 2014); she has four previous collections. She is a contributing editor to Tears in the Fence and is a former curator of the Poets Live reading series in Paris.