Lucy Anderton
ALL THE DOORS ARE HUMMING

a simple star-crack unwinding
in ropes of flat out

shaking silver. The white bird
is not raveled in thought

when it breaks open the brow
of the river with its

flung down flight. How
do I say it? I am there

for you. I am
never there for you. Not much

belief would walk your hand
straight through to my spine—

pluck at the chord
and make me see the un-me-the-non-

self—the marrow the choral
cut—Scalloping and scooping

oh sugar
head—I caught you

praying that autumn day
in June—we were too flat

snakes pressed into another
wet corner—we were all the head

turning of those fleurs yellow,
yellow—the eye

was hot.
We stared into the eye.

Our lips—
……………………..—our

cold, cold limbs
turning to the walls cot,

the sweeping eye,
the loving frond.

Lucy Anderton is happy to be here. Her work has recently appeared in Boston Review and is forthcoming in Tin House, and her collection The Flung You was published by New Michigan Press. She is currently raising her French-American girl in a 500-year-old brothel.

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #19.