Sophie Mayer

serried


stone as a statue
hands hung                    up
on imaginable hooks
salutes
to tunnels of steel
ceramic smoothedness
the barrel
through which words course and course

it’s been days, now,
of these wet images at dawn
barely ice crisping the puddle
and face plunged in
to the eyelashes

like licking my lips
with a stranger’s tongue
furred and numb
and intimate
in cinema after cinema
afloat on geographies
frozen
in boats with sails of faces

a young man in mascara
jumps the wall, razor wire
glinting a mirror ball

oh

of heart’s Jerusalem strength the walls still
with celluloid in serried ranks
wound and unwound
biked from Palast to Palast
in its cans
so discordant
its jangling at the optic nerve
its permeations
diving through skin
like a boy in skintight jeans
like your face through the eye of a cellphone camera
like red and red and red