we must imagine sisyphus happy

muse rituals

: Rain from us the world : Call us walls

invisible : In her, a brick of music : A mouth

she runs to roof : In us, protest a body’s

rain : A pail hides her field’s strain :

Gossamer whips with iris : Carp shouts trout

with sky : She rains her own destroyer,

I : You destroy, raining, I : Sheets awake skirts

raining : Pleats rain linen sleep : Rain draped

streets I sour : Shingled rain knows speaking

: With unknown rain shipped oceans : She reels

afloat my river : Treading rain temporal : Wash

our disarranged : Soaked rain holds

withdrawal : Lose rain in assemble : Grief

pales my window : Sketched so we is vain :

alexandra mattraw’s chapbooks are available at Dancing Girl Press, Beard of Bees, and Achiote Press. Her poems and reviews have also been featured in journals including VOLT, Cultural Society, Verse, Word For/Word, Realpoetik, Denver Quarterly, Seneca Review, Thethepoetry, alice blue, Diagram, 1913 Journal of Forms, and American Letters & Commentary. This spring, she will be a featured reader at City Lights Bookstore, Pegasus Books, Fort Mason’s Readers Bookstore, and St. Mary’s College. A former Vermont Studio Center resident, Alexandra curates a writing, reading, and art series called Lone Glen in Oakland.