How to make something: Poetry by Brittany Tomaselli

Brittany Tomaselli holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Fairy Tale Review, Columbia Poetry Review, and Black Tongue Review. She currently lives and works in Kalamazoo, Michigan.


Some burden is lifted

 
          while chewing on bread.
I need to be more and less patient with myself.

 
 
 

Once I found a quarter by the lake.
Anxiety as anxiety or garden
which is an abbreviation for people.

I can’t bring myself to use the enormous latch. You came into the fall playing solitaire.


Dear once or twice hit,

 
 
A red pickup truck on State Street drove by filled with buckets of marigolds. How admirable. Everyone is clapping. I’m awfully busy with measurements. Here. Have one for distance traveled by wind or waves. I just want to do something well.


I like this view though because.

 
I wish it would be cherry season         against all decree
the hilly figures are moving backwards again.

Don’t move that table.

And not the old thing sitting on the couch.

Now       trotting this way and that for those,

they painted giant eyes on the engine.


Whether he has a gun or the door does not open

 
 
 
your arms out on a stone pillar while talking

 
 
 
 
 

The garden went or jumped slow
don’t forget

Her off-hand cried
a much larger dark brown bird

 
 
 
 
 

Where should I have hidden?


What have I got to do with the night

 
 
 
 
 

fish spines

tiny little orchids

three thousand empty arches

 
 
 
 
 

Whether I said yes or

 
 
 

What will be different about you tomorrow
There is a white curtain in each and every window


Ashamed,

          altogether she became a plum in an-
other pagoda.

The sky, it seems, is often blocking the birds.

My own           in two’s, build supper-lands.
My lost four lives turned crisp south hue.


Today I’m going to work the way I did

yesterday.                     A red trolley

had rounded black windows there were lights.

I wish I were
composed of wind and
                              2 fine birds each
                                        holding a perfectly folded square map.


How to make something:

If how said always seems unwise, whittle it forever.
Impervious letters take time yelling about lopsided.

Do tell me which I’ve sown eventually.

Kettle, obsidian, flourite, amethyst, tiger’s eye, alabaster, opal. Tinúviel. Another silent animal from the past tipping the woodstove. Can’t only open things. All grief slays best.

Leery preaching lamps wobble my bedside. My window doesn’t notice the big “S.” Won’t nozzles stay true? Want nothing presupposed to fly.

Tiger lily, roses, myrrh, opium, lavender, frankincense, coriander, cloves.