America

Remember
All exit doors pull outwards

For security purposes, honey

Lady library
Said as she vacuumed the snow
Off my coat.

Du sinistre irresistible

Must be strong and stubborn
To resist, ignore, avoid
The signal that will hypnotize

Turn you into a sleepwalker, baby

Frankie hates cosmopolitans
She only likes patriots

The sweet smell of pine

Fruit that fell off the tree
Rotted before it was ripe.

Portmanteau

Something green
the length of my body
has dropped off my body

Arms without arms

Seams torn

My overcoat lies

                                         sprawled upon your vacant gray

Its eyes like loose buttons

Madonna Lachrymae

Was that I
who looked up to heaven
when the milk came in?

No stranger rain
inside the house
than with each drop
made love liquid

Whose hands are these
that clutch from within
and bid the breast speak

A new heartache?

Would it break me,
that decree

That open mouth be denied
and love pearl out, unstrung, from either side?

Loop

the ivory smells of the Concord hills

and Hawthorne's Marble Faun

"the red carbuncle in its casket"

first Rome, then Paris
now New York
artists at home, leeches
their originality bled out of them

as they catch the evanescent fragrance of

---

Vasiliki Katsarou has lived in Cambridge, Mass. and Paris, France. Her award-winning 35mm film poem, FRUITLANDS 1843, was inspired by the Transcendentalist utopian experiment. She is a member of the Princeton-based U.S. 1 Poets Cooperative.