Krysia Jopek’s novel Maps and Shadows (Aquila Polonica, 2010) won a Silver Benjamin Franklin award in historical fiction. Her chapbook Hourglass Studies (Crisis Chronicles, 2017), a sequence poem in twelve sections, was nominated for a 2018 Pushcart in Poetry. She has published poems in BlazeVox, Columbia Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Redactions, and The Wallace Stevens Journal, among other literary journals. She is the Founding Editor of diaphanous micro, an e-journal of literary and visual art.
SHADOW PUPPETS
We were thin shadow puppets in another country broken by wind.
There were rumors of biological warfare, laboratories of losses.
We didn’t have the right connections to get home on time or publish manifestos.
The quarantine proved to be a drama of the absurd, a sandbox too small.
Unexpected kindnesses decorated small spaces.
The light through the stone walls found ways inside us.
We lacked the confidence of performers, the artist approaching the canvas or text.
A paper-thin ship stuck in an ornate bottle misses the sea.
Our inner horsepower went restless and lazy simultaneously, a paralysis of movement—yet rampant worry.
Icarus was not a fool to want to be near the sun; he just misjudged the distance.
We hungered for food prepared by our mothers who left us.
Our fathers would tell us to be brave until this strange state of affairs was over—
the shipwreck of the singular on the cliffs of shadows.
Until then, an ancient chorus praying in a language we didn’t know
Permeated our parched skin with haunting sounds, and syllables.
WATERLOGGED BIRDS
The abstract paintings and sculptures untangled lost music.
The maestro’s hands transformed waterlogged birds. He knew.
The book the poet had been writing became too intense to hold.
Pages could be ripped out and folded for paper ships.
One match could take the whole fleet out.
Nothing is frozen externally, at least.
Too much is broken—the flowerpots, the left panel of the privacy wall, Buddha’s mossy chin, the rusted indoor table on the patio, the cat door, mantras for composure.
The scientist worked long hours researching a pill for heartache, for moving to the top of someone’s list.
The uninitiated will not understand.
One became very tired of being a pronoun.
