Spinning the Bottle
It was always
an empty bottle.
We were always
the dark.
Ardor is still
random and dizzy
and someone turns
the lights on
and the room
without the bottle
keeps spinning.
Magnet
What Ray Finney did
at Savannah Steel I
never knew. He gave
me magnets stamped
with the company name–
emerald shafts the color
of money but better
than cash: they had
heft and picked things
up: gem clips, fountain
pens, costume jewelry. You
had to be careful where you
left them, my mother said:
a magnet could make a wrist-
watch stop. It was a trick, I
thought, like giving a child
a cherry from a sweet
Rob Roy. Nobody had told
me yet that days are all
temporary, and the afternoon
Ray Finney wasn’t playing
dead in our backyard, I
held a magnet above him,
someone said, like a magic
wand or blunt instrument. I
never knew what he was
doing in our house, why
my mother pulled the drapes
tight, mid-day, what happened
to time, how I could not fix it.
Bridge
There was a swinging bridge
above a ravine. It connected
us to fear. It was constructed
of rope and oak and not
looking down. We held on
to the plausibility of falling,
but always reached some
other side. I have a swinging
now inside me, like
buildings engineered
for high winds and quakes—
to sway—and carry on.
Directional
He held
a match
up to see
which way
the dark
was going.
Musical Chairs
The chairs don’t actually
sing or play instruments.
The soundtrack is always
pre-recorded. It always sounds
like this: always, always,
a little tinny and sing-songy,
and then it stops and some-
one gasps and someone
whose lap you began
in has vanished.
Flight Pattern
I was five when I found
the head of the wren
by the road. I was older
when I found its wing.
By then, it was impossible
to piece even the idea
of a bird back together.
Andrea Cohen most recent poetry collections are Everything and Nightshade. A new collection, The Sorrow Apartments, will be out in 2024.