TWO POEMS by Julia Bloch

Level
for Sarah Dowling

In a view from the train,
as if the mixture of trees organized the water,
or a face over the surface of it,

or a new set of structures in the water.
One object hinges into another
and we know that is like ethicality,

if only from a long view, even in truest winter.
There may be this view from a train,
or the cooling effects of a train in winter

inflecting sight, like an altered tree,
and filtered distance that fashions
new structures, fibrous or laminate.

I did hear on the radio about a “bad little cloud,” I did
“click here to like this.” Then I watched the spilling among the trees.

–First published in Aufgabe 2010

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Port Chalmers

alarm in bird pipes
alarm in her chest of feathers
against stones, bits of spine in the water

I’d like to invert the image,
make it negative

everyone’s calling out
with some sort of instrument:
a plaster pipe, a throat
downhill from the alarm

performance is full-color
and the water’s pooled in among the rocks

–First published in P-Queue 2010

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Julia Bloch grew up in Northern California and Sydney, Australia, and lives in Philadelphia. Her poems have appeared recently in the journals Aufgabe, ONandOnScreen, Sidebrow, and Cricket Online Review, and in the anthologies Bay Poetics and The Odyssey. She is a founder and curator of the Emergency reading series at the Kelly Writers House, archived on PennSound, and works as an editor of the international poetics journal Jacket2.