Viennese Statues and other poems
Faith Gardner
Viennese Statues
Diminutive thrills, lounging on the windowsill
of a fifth-story room; Vienna is a view
decorous, bleeding white-blue faces chipped as pills
brazed to the buildings, fallow in the fountains too.
Statues here are sorrowful prisoners of fate
banished from death or decay; they are repainted,
reshaped, watching and wishing to participate,
ancient marble eyes that beg to be acquainted.
To stalk the hundred steps of Stepanplatz, to kiss
the sphinxes in the garden of the Belvedere,
to blink inside the house of butterflies in bliss --
but you, my dear statue, will never move from here.
Confronted not by ends, untouched you are by birth,
you remain a phantom manacled to the earth.
Ode to the Unenchanting
‘Tis rumored there is humor in your head,
and yet your lips are staid, your words are dull;
your energy the opposite of full.
I would prefer to chitchat with the dead
than sit with you a moment more, my friend,
whose odd abilities to stretch a second’s time
into a decade cause my teeth to grind,
my wishes flutter round an easy end
to my enchanted life as an escape
from you, the unenchanting human being,
whose drabness is a sodden curtain draped
around a bed of sunny thoughts I’m seeing.
I think of you as just a fleshy pile –
and cannot help but break into a smile.
Free Breakfast
The most enchanting event occurred
at breakfast this afternoon:
a UFO landed in my hash browns,
adjacent to my maple sausage.
The UFO was no larger
than a deck of cards,
no smaller
than a silver dollar.
The aliens embarked, one by one,
onto my fried potatoes.
There were only four of them,
caterpillars in aluminum foil pantsuits,
and I sent my plate back to the kitchen
for a free breakfast.
Faith Gardner is 24 years old and lives in Berkeley. She plays music in a band called Hooray for Everything and is trying to finish editing a feature-length movie in her spare time. She enjoys rollerskating and cartoons, and her stories and poems have been featured in Antimuse, Delivered, Lynx Eye, the Green Hills Literary Lantern and more.
Photo "Boxed" by Bella Dante.
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Poems Copyright © 2007 Faith Gardner. All rights reserved.
Photo Copyright © 2007 Bella Dante. All rights reserved.
