PoetryMagazine.com
Alice Friman

USA

Alice Friman’s fifth full-length collection is Vinculum, LSU, for which she won the 2012 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry. She is a recipient of a 2012 Pushcart Prize and is included in Best American Poetry 2009. A new collection, The View from Saturn is forthcoming from LSU in 2014. New work appears in The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, Boulevard, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review and others. Friman lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she is Poet-in-Residence at Georgia College. Her podcast series, Ask Alice, is sponsored by the Georgia College MFA program and can be seen on YouTube. alicefriman.com

 

 

 

Troubled Interiors

When fish wake in the sea
fin-shaken by whim 
or tide, what a confusion—
subject as they are to the wee 
switch in the brain that makes
permanently opened eyes see 
or not. But how enviable the dreams.
Lidless projections on big wet screens, 
unlike our own troubled interiors.

My mother too, in the high hours
of her dying, could not close her eyes.  
The once-bright hazel, transfixed 
under a yellowish glaze. The lower lids 
drooping inside out like buntings 
of raw meat. Animal under the ice, 
frozen in sight of the hole. I could not look.

Fish stare, stare of the all-knowing,
stare of retribution—or was that imagined—
as I laid a cool wet cloth over her eyes.  
For her comfort, I said. Then holding her hand 
and singing the songs she’d always sung to me, 
I sang her, blindfolded, out of this world.

A good daughter? Let me tell you.
The eye of ice flings enough light to read by.  
Even now, six years later, lying here in the dark, 
I can still make out the words. Liar. Fraud.


First published in Prairie Schooner

 

 

 

 

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