Two Collage Poems by Helen Hofling
NOT VENUS
We are walking from point to
point and back each day,
a condition which prevents
memories from forming.
I once had a mind like a flytrap.
Not Venus, but cider vinegar
in a jar with a hole-punched lid.
What flies in will, for some reason, meet
difficulty getting out.
Dog and I are walking and
sometimes running past trees,
train tracks, enormous
construction machines, all
along the dirty stream.
Each time we pass a person
we pull cooling balaclavas
up over our noses, items purchased
for exactly this circumstance, junk
perfect in its social utility, mysterious
as to whether it can trap
particulate. Sometimes we wave,
the person and I, dog never
even considers it as she snaps at weeds
with her dark, parched jaws, seeking
hydration in unlikely areas.
I suck damp fabric into my face and think
of beautiful spiny plants
opening and shutting their pink mouths.
MATERIAL CONDITIONS
I made everything beautiful
And it didn’t make a difference
You still cried in the morning
I screamed us both awake at night
Contrary to my deepest intuition, it seemed
Beauty yielded no material control
Or maybe beauty’s influence was so material
It could not touch where we needed to be
Touched, a place not immaterial but nonmaterial,
I reminded us, even though it didn’t matter
How much we hated it
It was still there.
Helen Hofling is a Baltimore-based writer, editor, and artist. Her work can be found in Berkeley Poetry Review, The Columbia Review, Electric Literature, Lambda Literary, New South, Passages North, Prelude, and elsewhere. She is a member of the PEN Prison Writing Project, and she teaches writing at Loyola University Maryland.
