SUZANNE MARIE HOPCROFT

Suzanne Marie Hopcroft's poetry has recently been featured or will
soon appear in journals including The Catalonian Review, White Whale
Review, PANK Magazine, and Precipitate; her fiction has appeared in
elimae, Foundling Review, Camroc Press Review, and others. Suzanne
is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Yale University and
writes from New York City, where she also teaches composition at
Hostos Community College.

---

Willing Power

Stop counting
cars. The cracks in
every patch of asphalt aren't
a knife held to your

breathing. None of
us gets why you tremble at
rutting cows, how coffin
troubles don't properly disturb

you, but a handshake can't
buy your hash browns or help

you keep them down. It only
appears to be sleeting through
the blinds when dawn
starts climbing up

your trestle. And anyway,
the mind always does
what it wants when

you tell it not to.






Unnameable

It isn't about that. Not the lumbering breath paper-
weighted by grinding out sweat and mixing in
tears, meek skirt squirms a flag strung up to
wave surrender in his beer-borne breeze. Now

flannel against her cheek is sand and cotton
never between her thighs, a kick-belly of rage the
thing she carries. But it isn't about that.

And no, it isn't about that. Not the open-
wide palette of girl-child skin where the vessels
broken make her mind a river, circled works of
fire that lick her knee wounds from tumbling

down. Now she feels every jolt; tender
joints and haunches make a fault line for her
quakes. But no, it isn't about that.

It's about the un-naming of things. The way
they shriek siren calls for telling and end anchor-
sunk in brine, ship sails passed beyond.






Penn Station, New York City

Sometimes your eyes play
tricks. The shadow passing by
your shoulder isn't steel on
track, not red and platinum set
to trample you in the three-
quarter light of the station if

you fall. Just another
body, it is not impossibly

close. It doesn't deserve
the shudder, the sudden
dread of your days coming
dear and going quick.

But then there are the
things you see and can't
believe. Like the bared brown
breasts of the woman sitting
opposite, two heavy pendulums

stilled and loose. That soft pear
stomach against a white
wrapped sheet that only hides
her thighs and hips, which
don't tremble once in the

stale air. The tenement
bed you know she pulled the
cloth from, its crusted floors and
walls stinking in the heat, her

mind melting too: the mind that
let her feet walk free and
naked until they were
underground.






Permutation

The missing I feel today is for
the things I won't have

ever. The peaked tent, the
mulberry way, my
feet on the hollowed
stones. The me who

in some alternate rendering of
the universe would have
snapped a whip over
the mare's swayed

back, called the mare the
mare, known that
difference from across
the grain. I can see

her, this other me. If I
squint she is prettier than
I look in the grey glass of
your window, crowding

the passenger side as we
glide too quickly between
the pale shacks of our
downtown.

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