isolation sonnet #4
I spent the day failing to describe music. It’s like
leaving a window open for a man who asks you,
fully joking, if he can sneak in later, so you tell him
sure, and he says okay. You both know he’s not coming.
What he doesn’t know is you’ve waited at the sill
for hours, your lips turning the color of the sky, which
is steel-blue, until it’s black, until a far-off bassline
creeps through the bare screen, soft as an open mouth
on your ear, which itself is now vibrating, a flute made
of cartilage and blood, producing a tone so clean
that it purifies your entire body, enabling you to look
at yourself, for once, without revulsion, the mirror
revealing crow’s feet, bones, then an absence so deafening
it shakes the trees, language falling dry from the branches.
isolation sonnet #2
Wish I could touch you. Wish I could say everything
I’m terrified to say. Wish I’d said it then, instead
of driving down to Lake Merced, promising I’d be home
before dark, then watching the horizon incinerate itself,
each cypress a firework of pure ash. I didn’t know then
what I was hiding from – I was unaware of my own hiding,
much as I was unaware of the thousand mites dwelling
in my eyelashes, until my brother told me they were there,
but don’t freak out, he said, because only half the cells
in your body are even yours, the rest are bacteria, viruses,
swallowed strands of hair, children to whom we’d be
terrible parents, think about it, we never told each other
no, never thought we’d tire of our game, or at least I didn’t,
until the lake was black, until you’d quit trying to find me.
Clare Flanagan is a Brooklyn-based poet, editor, and music writer. Raised in Minnesota, she now resides in New York City, where she was recently a Wiley Birkhofer fellow at NYU. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Poetry Online, OSU’s The Journal, and Poetry Northwest, among others. When she’s not at work on her full-length manuscript, she enjoys reading, long-distance running, and listening to Charli XCX.