Frances Brent
INTERIORS

1.

I’ve been thinking about the fish in a glass bowl–loneliness,
silence, wasted beauty.
The fish appears in my imagination, passes through the reef hole,
travels here and there—weightless and random cartridge.
I watch its inch-long vanishing spur.
The pimento spark hurts my eye.

2.

Inside the skin house:
lift an iron shoe
onto the wooden riser.
Shoulder and torso harnessed.
Then swing back, back and forth,
from here to a speck of myself
in the parachute
of myself.

Frances Brent is the author of The Beautiful Lesson of the I (May Swenson Poetry Award) and The Lost Cellos of Lev Aronson (Atlas & Co.).

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