Flax Store
(Ed. Oberleithners Söhne spinning factory, Halbseit,
photo likely 1920s)
Dust or light or fiber or slant
of shaft or dust of dust or light or
afternoon of afternoon of
what this century spun
or morning of rope of chalk of
pulley of light or spun into
or light drifting between the gaps
the shaft caught driving down
packed the shaft
the angled gentle sway
of soft planed timber
and if the light at morning
caught the angle of the shaft
and less
the angle of the timbers
that support the posts
supporting beams and rafters
planed to form the ceiling
shining almost swung
graceful light or dark
and shadow chalk
on slate letters
numbers the pulley
still attached to a bale in the middle
of a pile long line
of squared bundles
packed and stacked marked
B 422/ [illegible]/ O/ Slanetz
left on another slate: “P. 426/ D…./ O Slanetz”
one swung cord draped
over the rafters
a shaft of light a rope
a ladder propped against a beam
of square dark timber crossing
the storeroom’s width
how many hundred stalks of flax
here bundled soft? the fibers couched
in crackling straw the lines
of xylem in the wood aligned
like stalks along the grain
aligned and joined
floor walls ceiling holding
everything
is light
once captured captured light
released metabolized by dew
and microbes retting flax
on fields in Russia
is this before the empire’s end—or after?
and which empire even?
either way
the bales are stacked
up to the ceiling
toward the back and look
like piles of worn old rags
gathered and bound together
and it is dark
upon the bundles where
the stack’s so tall
it blocks a window
I spin here on my continent
and in my century
my fingers slipped with water
smooth and twist a dozen shining fibers:
when fused together
it grows duller less like hair—
—a bolt of cloth laid out to bleach
on fields in winter is smooth it looks
like light looks like a streak
of light through dust through dust
or light or fiber or slant
filling the space around
the fiber packed up here
up to the rafters in the store
Monika Cassel’s poems and translations from German have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, AGNI, The Georgia Review, Guesthouse, The Adroit Journal, Orion Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and Deep Vellum' Best Literary Translations 2025 anthology, among others. Her manuscript Rehearsal for Future Hungers was a finalist with River River Books, and she was awarded the Poetry Magazine 2024 John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation. She lives in Portland, OR, is an assistant poetry editor for Four Way Review, and holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College.