Nightingales

The serving girls argue
who will collect the eggs
from the chicken coop

and from his bed
the master hears them.
The white moon has swung

over the roof and split
open dusk.
It is a dream I am having

more and more and more:

a rooster spits devotions into the sky’s
sleeping throat
then loses his head;

the cows have shed their shadows
under the juniper and slither
into the pastures;

what was dark turns darker
in the sun.
It is a dream I am having

but it is happening now: know,

inside these girls, there are
one thousand others
carrying the peeps

and squawks of every
bird that dared
to snatch a currant

from a thorny bush. They say
the teeth can be a gate-
way to the truth.

Know, inside those girls

there are one
thousand others.

Now here,
through the door—

a crack
in the light. And words
in their mouths.

In the corner
of an unnamed room,
they call

for a piece of fruit.

Looking Down Zakole Street

There a streak of people
crowds the sidewalk
from the pharmacy
to the Billiard

& Disco, and I stand
still, remembering
a single shadow I had
almost missed;

it gnawed itself free
from the wall
and slid through the grass

past the soviet-style
low blocks,
the iron swings,
the bottles in the street

and straight into a rabbit

hole. Was it a smudge of black,
thick smoke

or the tattered echo
of a dog’s red bark? Was it

a baby sun, playing
tricks on me?

For the longest time,
my mind is dusty like an alleyway.

It is only when I hear
the wall screaming

I realize
it may be a riot
I am remembering, and

the next time I do

I paint a mural
over it, of a crowded city street—

there are men, children,
dogs and soldiers

holding clouds of balloons
in their teeth. And two women,

unannounced, making their way
through the meat

of the crowd in the hardened sunlight.

One chews a toothpick,
one nothing;

one of them looks
like me, one doesn’t.

Born in Konin, Poland, Anna Geisler is a Toronto-based poet and a recent graduate from Pacific University’s MFA program. Her poems have been published in numerous journals in Canada and the United States, most recently Nine Mile magazine and Juniper Poetry Journal. “I Am Trying to Evaluate a Girl Running Laps Around a Basketball Court” has been nominated for the Intro Journals Project.

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