Lara Egger

Handsome

The feeling begins in the body.
I can’t tell       

if the water’s deep. Language waits
behind velvet ropes
to be ushered into the palace.                                   

Is this doorway
an entrance or an exit?

How often
I have been wrong.

There are blackberries all over the sidewalk.
There’s symbolism
and then there’s rain.

I photograph time in portrait mode.
Later, in panorama.

Love is a construct. I’m strikingly resourceful.
Pipe cleaners;
the poetic line;
a shiny dead fish eye.

Because I enjoy an ambush of foxglove.
Because I’m comforted by the ubiquitousness

of hands. 

Did I miss desire’s eclipse? Tragic parallax.

My animal
always returns. Good animal.
It won’t lie down.
It can smell the sky sweating.

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Lara Egger is the author of How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It, which won the Juniper Prize for Poetry (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021) and the John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Her poems have appeared, or will soon appear, in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, The Southern Review, Conduit, Bennington Review, Ninth Letter, The Southeast Review, Verse Daily and elsewhere. Originally from Adelaide, Australia, Egger now lives in Boston where she co-owns Estragon Tapas Bar.