Elizabeth Fodaski

Two poems

     Latent Progress
     Short History

Latent Progress

a petite rage is flying over this apricot sky and
      bottling the chatter of spaces.
It wasn’t to have been
          an end.
Scourge of brushed
pardons wrestles a
secular pity everywhere
from these bruised
specimens
on the table.
Image this
unruffling
as such.
A tapestry of clouded
speech at breakfast,
misgiving in a
slip-stream run-off
mind over the latter
      half of the night’s
           purpose
           plumed
     on the victory of word
over word
a handful of perfect
     autumn mistakes


Short History

It started with cities, two
moons, and a tattered
armchair spinning all the
way through decades of windy
tunnels, visions, cool clear nighttime
bridges of stuttering
cars and twinkling
buildings in the slit of an
eye. Vast and studded with
milky windows
reflecting only that
singular light, our skyscrapers rose to
clocks, we were grown
to assume the world
contained us. It started with a
plush and distensible scaffolding
electric in that
moon, strumming the winter's icy
tune. It started with floods, always
floods, then a viscous
certainty and
in suit a series of
similarly prone
resistances. It started
like that perfect
lemonade over and
over again in grooves black as
a hearse or somebody’s
shoes. With a
steady and querulous
vernacular treading too
lightly on its own
dusty tarmac to
register. It
started with syncopated
meals and a
Chevrolet burning
halfway up the
hill, our halfway prepared
oblation, half
squandered, half
masked

Elizabeth Fodaski is the author of fracas (Krupskaya, 1999). She lives in New York City where she teaches English at Saint Ann’s School.