Alexandra Dreyzin

EVENING SONGS (AFTER LULLABIES BY JOHN YAU)

1.
 
A smile bends, tracing the edge of a saucer.
Blue lips are warmed with tea.
 
We played checkers instead of breakfast.
In the mornings, the board was red and white.
 
The fireplace had a revelation,
spoke in tongues, singed photographs.
 
I hung a curtain last night.
The trees couldn't sleep.
 
The white picket fence pierced holes in the sky.
She hems with blue thread.
 
Her lips bend, tracing the edge of the rocking chair.
She sways to her song, humming, not on a gramophone.
 
 
2.
 
The yellow streetlamps are the same shape as the full moon.
The moon is white.
 
A black tree rises into the night,
leaves uncountable.
 
I tilt my head
back to see Ionic columns.
 
Massive, white – they are behind the streetlamps
and beside a tree.
 
The tree is bigger than columns and rooftops,
wider and taller beneath the full moon.
 
A black cloud is on the white moon.
The sidewalk is tilted.
 
 
3.
 
The constellations have evolved,
and all the sky has shifted like Pangaea.

I walked up the stairs to your room
and erased the left wall.
 
You spent a year drawing a sand dune.
Now you are a centimeter off.
 
A hummingbird flies backwards.
The tide moves back.
 
She played the Allegro
on her long black hair
 
instead of strings.
Black spider-webs against a purple dusk
 
a song rises like heat.

Alexandra Dreyzin is originally from Yardley, Pennsylvania and is currently a sophomore at Brown University. She is the current Poetry Editor for a literary magazine at Brown and has had poems published in Reflections, Poetic Hours, Tiger's Eye Journal, and in the "Live Poet's Society" Anthology of High School Poets.