Poetry by Noel Sikorski

Tery CC




Baby 

                                                             After Dalton Gata’s I Don’t Need You to Be Warm, 2021
 
My crown of hair on fire, and my shaggy coat, a pelt of smoke. 

I’m the only lady here 
smoking, also as in smoking, as some called babes (not baybees) 
in the time before now. 
And, welcome, this is my desolate field, my barren ground, 
to the right and to the left  

a few stones, some shells, a former seabed, I guess, 
and behind me, at the horizon, mountains 
more liquid like rumor than rock, or whatever 
it is that make mountains mountains 
and these, these few stalks, emaciated shrubs, clearly exhausted
from punching through the hard soil, lean left
in the wind shrieking 

I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. 

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Brief Interlude 

Tis strange but not novel nor deranged when a colleague you barely know shows up in your dream. This is the year whenever you hear a loud squeak from something being flattened, you wonder, is it me? 

In your waking life, your heart is failing, but here 

through a window small as a wine grape, you watch as a red fox, the kind of fox that’s either giggling or cloaked as your grandmother, stands up on its hind legs and walks on water. 

The cool aqua of a community pool flickers 

in the courtyard of an Airbnb in Dallas, one of many you walked past (but didn’t swim in) after flying nearly 1400 miles to keep fucking a guy, who helped you see how easy it is to shed that cloak some call self-respect for some good sex. Jesus. All the community pools of my life gather here and now, ask me to bend my knees: repent.

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Noel Sikorski (she/her/hers). Her work has been published in the anthology Braving the Body; The American Poets Magazine; Painted Bride Quarterly; The Georgetown Review; The Bellevue Literary Review; Action, Spectacle; The Delmarva Review, and forthcoming in the anthology, The Big Brutal Act. She teaches in the Expository Writing Program at NYU.




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