“A girl needs a gun these days on account
of all the resonant memories.”

Mellifluent moon on the lips of the maddened
The orchards and towns are greedy tonight
The stars appear like the image of bees
Of this luminous honey that offends the vines
For now all sweet in their fall from the sky
Each ray of moonlight’s a ray of honey
Now hid I conceive the sweetest adventure
I fear stings of fire from this Polar bee
that sets these deceptive rays in my hands
And takes its moon-honey to the rose of the winds

Guillaume Apollinaire

Poem that has no awareness of being a poem

Or how it gives itself away by going on
and on about the distance between two planets

when what it means is Wednesday
and the bruising effect that lipstick has

on a glass. A kind of Morse code,
it isn’t aware that it is changed by the person

who interprets it. Here, a cat is scratching
an earthquake on the intruder’s skin.

Here, we’re both drunk and married.
Here, loneliness as drizzle rewrites

the graffiti on the train. Word after word,
the reader falls into the poem and is disguised,

like a bogeyman checking on someone’s children,
a trapdoor with dead things to hide.

Arlene Ang