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Picture"Pfalzblick" by Jasmin Bauer

Pursuit
​
1. 

Two floors up in San Francisco, 
I printed out your emails, 
soaked with soap bubbles and—. 
Pages sank to bathmat. 
Submergence, your words--
my torn off blue jean pocket, 
long kept—interspersed with 
quotation, theories of mind. 
Just feel, you wrote,
fucking feel. Is that right?

No. The tub was in Oakland;
I wasn’t happy. Neither,
I think, were you. Shards 
of possibility. Clouded 
costume jewels. That which 
is fractured, as you said, 
still cuts. Fucking feel--
make them feel it too.      



2. 

Lying atop you on 
your black cloth sofa
(the one the dog would 
one day piss all over)
listening to a CD, 
Made in Canada,
by that New York band
that longed to be another
Joy Division. 

                             One ear 
pressed to your belly; 
one, a tiny satellite dish 
gathering half-chords 
in a minor key, cold as television
snow, an exploration story--



3. 

Redeye flight into ice,
snow heavy over 

Pittsburgh—delayed 
flight circling, invisible 

hills, from there—dipping 
down through gray cloud 

cover, thick with snow 
conifers outside the airport. 

A half-mad cabby, ice-shouldered 
roads. The river, the Mon, 

the Ohio, brown churn, bits of 
ice runoff breaking here and 

there beneath yellow painted 
rivets, girders. Soothing your 

voice on a roaming cell phone. 
Ten minutes from seeing you, 

in your large woolen scarf. 
Nothing else.



4. 

Together in my first car, 
four-door sedan, four cylinder, 
overhead camshaft, automatic 
transmission, driving south
to Northern California,
through redwood forests
moss-glow tinged, slipping
light through somehow
while one of several CDs
you’d lugged all the way from winter
became the soundtrack for your first
vacation in a decade.

When hills came and flora
shrank to expected sizes, 
you took the wheel, and I taught
what little I knew of braking:
spotting the apex, accelerating
out of your turn.  




5.

Shivering ever so slightly,
just enough to bunch 
that long grey coat closer, 
to tighten around the white lace
négligée later left errantly 
somewhere in that attic hotel
room in Newport, Rhode Island,
where everything—from the painted
and repainted walls to the salt air--
shimmered with off-white 
whiteness. That’s when--
as you paced the old-wood 
balcony, looking out on 
eye-white sails and dull 
yellow hulls of bobbing 
fiberglass skiffs—the locals
screamed in unison, and you
jumped ever so slightly, pulled 
my arms closer, closer around 
you, another new coat to match 
your new name, and tilted 
your face toward mine, 
whispered (over the shouts, 
the harbor lights): I guess 
the Red Sox won, 
then pulled me back to bed 
and cold lobster pizza. 




Les Kay

Les Kay holds a PhD from the University of Cincinnati's Creative Writing program. His first chapbook, The Bureau, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications in 2015. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of literary journals including The McNeese Review, Redactions, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review, Whiskey Island, and Sugar House Review.

​Jasmin Bauer is a German artist. She works with acrylic and her verity is a mixture of pop-art and photorealistic objects. Her art has been exhibited in several castles and newspapers in Germany. Besides being an artist, she loves good wine and traveling all over the world. www.trendculture.jimdo.com
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