Rauan Klassnik
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Next Morning’s Story

Your ring was in my pocket and I was afraid I’d lose it and I kept checking for it and I saw myself tiny and shrinking down in the dark woods with your ring rolling around in my pocket -- and you, you were spread through the trees like all the star’s teeth. I was trembling, scared to death, and I was filled with light.

Brightness

She chipped a tooth on the toilet throwing up. Pulled the blinds and sat with an ice pack on her face. Drifting off, a piece of light flexing in her blood, her eye makes a poem of everything. A leaf turned red, stuck to the window. The house itself, covered in red. There’s a gale outside. All the fishing boats struggling home. She´s standing by a horse. “Put your hand on its face (the voice of a man she loved) and now, slowly, (like the sun) run your fingers through its hair.”

(from Heaven - 14)

The sound of a broom in the yard below is a hand through someone’s hair. Hunters entering a field. As they move in, further and further behind their dogs, you listen more and more closely, and they stretch out like clouds, like skins, like children curled up in a quiet square dreaming of planets and oceans forming.