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Imogen CASSELS

            Five Poems

Felicity / / /
Two types of
the same return / Moss &
Sketch for a





Excerpted from Hotel #6—see here.



Felicity 



Morning irising; some things are no good, where
you forgot she wore her legs like that, a symmetry
I never heard of. Best in paradise at night alone
or fen coe (this tristesse); a bleu néant that’s inbuilt,
slipping into difficulty or easy-access grace like
salt in a wound. Spirit is a bone; hail is cashmere;
this feels chic and not nervous, now and very typically
cyanotype. Whenever I’ll be afraid / of the obscurity

of water this moment is apocalyptic and a type of heaven,
with marmalade. Or blood honey. Seasons new wear
lightly throw off your clothes spread wide awhile—Oh,
where? Like Ink or Charcoal, that’s a readymade or just
citational beatitude. And like spring for furs reasonable,
you
could do that with anything, couldn’t you?





/



another en train to Harlow which resembles    
     fashion landscape almost—anyway it’s minimal
with decent light. a heroin named Rosalind,
     Ophelia a cut of dress (the corset’s see-through
you luminous). like virginity or any threshold strung
     to tenderness or somehow held: once you
have worn these things you can’t return; it feels like
     nothing, or heaven, silk-lined. I find it’s true.
I want to marry you but I’d rather have a pair
     of Miu Miu cat eyes or more black fox. blessure,
a sacrifice you signed for prior to waking. I haven’t
     stitches yet, which retains inevitability, sexy,
without coy traces. live free die strong should make us lithe
     and various, advancing ahead while fumbling
around in the dark, a motto for bad reading made
     reparative. and when I arrive, then, honey-like-heather:
your eyes are nothing like the sun in Hackney





Two types of the same return



but in a beetle by mining exos and drops
of rain and bush dust
                                   it’s beautiful to be
trim or take lines up to the loaded moon /
in a naïve swoop tanglier. “these are
the glass minutes of my eyes, or like
I could eat twice as many flowers as you

I’m trailing off, crush-crush.

                                                  it’s
January it’s almost spring every starlit fence
is tiny. the primroses saying know know know
or hello!,
     opened vein or
                              do you even have roses?

                              the size of a continent.
my mother is a rowan tree I’m so conspicuous without.
artifice enough for any hope lopsided,
your means of soutiens,
to Paris in our times.

                                   comprehending.
and the magpies—five—skirmishing
won’t console hurt. motherofpearl inlay me
all across my back.     stained glass
whatever.      thousands of bats fly out of a cave //
I love art.      with all the accidental tendresse of holding out
a mobile calling “it’s for you—
                                                 forwent something
almost being said:

                                    my breastbone is a bat
put out of temper; I am become a shrine;
sad flush of every demi-form;
it catches like a sycamore





Moss 



dizzy weepies with repeat oh morning hazel
she’s so suspended third so autopilot harmony
wish if grief would label itself to imagine
repeating a summer again like circle at least
six or whatever unknowing what a window
means there is a hot line of fabric on my back
and the centre of my lips is a heart I’ve such
an amount of nothing in my pocket you’d
never listen without is hell oh hiya ilya ilya ilya
there’s no fix for never having your siskin
daughter furling out of place well uplight
blossom this the sun damage blissing kate’s
narrow chest blueshirt new in for may
the luminous possibility of a child





Sketch for a



I can’t believe you expect me to be beautiful
through all of this. I mean, I expect myself.
It’s difficult: blazer April pink gelée champagne
liner yacht foreclosed a blue prow. Google maps
at night. Do with frosting disparage for a thicket
brackish throw oystering. Accidental happiness
the slight the company she kept: it’s a small form
to gather; you could fold or pleat me. There are
so joys still: a pigeon breast’s diagonal of bright
searedness; cherry wood; chips a gin and tonic, sinew.
Well that summer it was hot—it glowed—and I
had started bleeding—like when you cornered
the avant-garde, after the symposium, and asked him
what would come next and he just shrugged
and said “love






Imogen CASSEL’s poems have appeared in the London Review of Books, Blackbox Manifold, Cumulus, Datableed, Ambit and on the London Underground.

See @imogen_cassels.







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