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Theodora Ziolkowski

The Virgin Room

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The portrait of the Virgin loomed
over a writing desk stuffed with
stationary. Even when there was
no one to write to, everyone I knew

was in the kitchen, still up, talking.
I am a guest in this house of books,
where all the shelves perspire
as if drawn from the seas.
Like a good girl, I do

what I’m told. I write letters
to no one, tuck into bed.
The Virgin’s gaze is the
result of an arrangement

that’s already been made.
You can’t control what a mind
can do. And the Virgin would
know. She was a little girl, too.


Mary’s Child

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“The girl promised to be obedient, and when the Virgin Mary was gone, she began to examine the dwellings of the kingdom of heaven.”
— Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Trans. D. L. Ashliman


Here, vapor is for remedial purposes.
Have a cold?

Sniff this.
A headache?

You must get down on the ground
to be closer to God.

Fear not the exhaustion of peering
into faultless square rooms.

Q:         What is the matter with you?

A:         You are not safe
             and this heaven

             was never your home.

You must be tidy to inhabit tiny.
All the easier to inhabit a life

that is not your own.


At Third Glance

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At the British Museum,
the bill of the stuffed
platypus is polished like
a shoehorn.

I reach out my hand
as an offering
of peace or of
what —

I don’t know what.


*


In the tram, my coffee cup clatters on its saucer.

Age eighteen, my sister dyes her hair platinum.


*


Stuffed starlings hover above palms
in the shop window.

My sister breathes grease on the glass
as if she can’t get close enough.

As if there is something to hear.


*


My sister and I lie in the grass.
The poppies tower over our faces.

My sister finds a dog in the clouds.
A wolf, to be specific,
but all I see are swans.


*


In my lap, a postcard:
Guthrie’s “Hind’s Daughter”
standing in a patch
of plump cabbages
holding a knife.

Something has happened
to the print,
like it has been rained on.


*


On one side of her door,
my sister painted a tree,
a woman with red
hair on its reverse.

I realize my sister drifting
in and out of the tram
is not her

but a woman balancing
a tray filled with cake.
A flash of the freight,

at first glance my sister
mounts the back of a swan.

I press my face to the cold window,
wave.


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