Villain

In a long line of villains
The poem asks

How immaterial
Is each act of perfidy

Shouldn’t one instead stamp
The whole crate

Hazardous waste
Flammable old cans

Thrown down the balcony
Rocking on your heels you fall

To thinking about the day
You crossed your heart

At Chene Park to say the Pledge
Facing the flag with 1,200 other brides

Strange to think of it as last century
As if installing air quotes

Around certain words
Made them any less ancient

Come

Across a framework
For understanding

What goes with the territory
We call interiority

The dreamlife of working
Class women: a little dance

We do before the mirror
Prettier doubles pour

From rafters even as
We flip a switch

And crawl down stairs
Lest we trip on marbles

Beneath which the fable
Ends: someday my prince …

Antidote

In the infinite game that death plays
We pass every barrier every last shroud
It fingers like a mad seamstress

Shattering her dummy, weary of the repetition
She endures when the straps tighten

Meanwhile invisible details swim ashore
In advance of our bodies’ intimate knowledge
A last chance to turn the tide that begins
The voyage home

—For Peter Gizzi

Chris Tysh is a poet whose latest publications are Hotel des Archives: A Trilogy (Station Hill Press, 2018) and Derrida’s In/Voice (BlazeVOX 2020). She holds fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and The Kresge Foundation, as well as a Murray Jackson Creative Scholar in the Arts Award from Wayne State University where she teaches writing. She is the poetry editor of Three Fold, an independent arts quarterly,