CHRISTINA LANCASTER

Christina Lancaster graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in '08 and will be attending
The New School in Fall '11 to begin her MFA in Poetry. She has been published in .ISM
Magazine and is currently continuing her study of the Japanese language.

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The Unfolding

I never expected to be in this position:
eyes paling,
kneecaps loosened,
hair turning stiffly to rust
on my bathroom floor.
I hold a dusty brush and press
the boar hair to my skin.
Colors collect in my wrinkles
like water caught in footprints.

Pulling back the folds of my face,
I find baptisms in first snow,
summer backyard BBQs,
a rising sun,
a yellow Bingo token.








A Weak Yield Grows

On viewing Van Gogh's "Wheat Field with Crows"

Calling from heights that once nourished
a space gone dead, I hear the sick
blue voices of bodies in fog—
clotted sky held over a harvest stopped short.

Begging a thin wet breath,
dried up roots of sour white bread
lean deeply into the earth,
not yet sure what good has been taken.








Basquiat

Hands spread
to say, stop—
lustrous eyes
slicked with cold
black
brushless
dilation.
Compression
forced out
to art:
ribcage,
inward growing heart.








Method

Grandma has always
kept her pills in the same
large plastic baggy: a zip top
for storing ounces of weed
or vital organs in transit.
She never bothers
with cases marked in block:
| Su | M | T | W | Th | F | S |.
Instead,
the tablets clink together,
and markings wear away
with just a small spread of plastic
to collect their pill-dust:
the only evidence of
a thousand pills previous,
clinging to each other
by shared residue.

Cataracts clot in her eyes
and she won't notice
as a few gems tumble
down the drain.
She'll fall
asleep while I'm
still talking to her,
miss tonight's
Law and Order,
and hours later,
she'll remember
only the shapes of things.

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