Dispatch from the Front

My zonings out are keeping me hazardous,
preoccupied, up half the night yet still
busy (see enclosed) in gainful fits.

Zones of war, time—I have woken up
in three in fewer weeks. Today, to cries
like shorebirds make, a fixed predawn
fogbank dislodged, scudded reluctant
into hardcore daybreak. And yet before
my eyes unclosed, I was asking where? Am I

spilt again? Split? Here, by way of
greeting, my new landlords respond.
Reveal to me I have been fishmouthing
again in my landlocked sleep—O O O—.

What surprises await they believe
I have foreknowledge of. It is why
they must surveil, they claim, my night
sweats and fever dreams through a feed
produced by whatever they have planted
in the unsettling clutter included in my rent.

Magnets of tourist hotspots, candles
stinking of lab vanilla, locked and keyless
padlocks nesting in the loose change
of devalued, once-sovereign currencies
in the drawer for small, obdurate objects
that stalk me whenever wherever I go.

In a closet in the darker of my two rooms,
I am developing. Blink of why. Ink
of an eye. Having already secured my lip
-reader, my guide and fixers, I take
a bracing stop-bath dip. Dripping, I re-e
-merge. Now hold up what’s been captured
to the light of your big window. Next,

hold closely to your ear all I have taken
from their collection on the shelves of a cracked
old vitrine. Hold every last echoing shell. Each
hollow casing. It’s nothing close—the roaring
you will hear. Nothing close to any ocean.

Docklands, London

Fears of him falling into a canal
infect my dreams. Night mirrors in the boy’s
grasp of my overstating what annoys
me: traffic; loud toys—. An unnamable
off smell.

                         His nightmare’s me when I corral
him from water’s-edge sightings. Boats, buoys,
bright craft under sail. Highstreet throngs and noise.
Lanes between threats thin as a coffin nail.

Yet somehow we survive the week and each
other. Notwithstanding the rental flat’s
dearth of essentials. Hand towels, a spoon.

Suspended high, our slim balcony’s beach-
-head gives onto evening skies.
                                                  Their ersatz
stars—against bedtime’s dread offing—festoon.

Translator, essayist, and poet Jo Ann Clark is the author of the collection 1001 Facts of Prehistoric Life (Black Lawrence Press, 2015). Her writing has appeared in The New Republic, Paris Review, Boston Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. A native Alabaman who grew up foremost in Alaska and Maine, she is also a teacher and non-profit administer whose international career has taken her to Italy, China, and Hong Kong. She lives in the Hudson River valley.