ASSAY / ESSAY

Girl as fay, illusory,
she moves through rooms as draft.

Girl as snowdrop,
asleep under soil. As fawn, fox
from nearby wood.
Linden blossom.

Girl as girl unwound, younger
in an achromatic drawing:
charcoal outline, white oven
mitt shoved in the mouth, gray nail
polish spilling over black
floor, walls.

Dim, diffused,
gathering in orbs,
girl as light.
Scattering of birds.
Headlights, moth-flocked.

Dreaming girl, glass-nailed,
copper-veined,
shedding silver, drawing blood.

Bruised, overheated, awake.
Tasting burnt rubber, testing the dark.
Girl with her uterus starlit, diamantine,
her bones compact, marrowless.

Girl as oxygen mask.
Girl under water, as spark plug,
the metal of her rusting.

A field.

A hundred hot air balloons,

lifting.

—

Ondrej Pazdirek is a Czech-American poet and translator. His poems and translations have most recently appeared in Poet Lore, Phoebe, Columbia Poetry Review, and Guernica, and are forthcoming from Western Humanities Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Two Lines, among others. He lives in Cincinnati.