Adèle Barclay

Our Lady of Perpetual Landscape

Green heart, bronze boot, your monkey
in a paper hat, your bathing cap
and Victorian muumuu.

Every poet loves a painter,
a shrine of pressed leaves
and rabbit skin glue.

I choose a broken pelvis,
a crescent moon, a halo of Guadalupe,
nails to scratch photographs.

I can’t escape cathedral
grove. My teeth crack to carve
a cup into trunks of painted trees.

My tongue knots into a thousand–
petal lily to sink a beige boat
the melon sky forgets.