Tag Archives: Isabel Owen

by | April 27, 2017 · 11:49 am

Isabel Owen

holiday

“Good to see you.” the blurring lights

of northern boulevard slinking in sleep

paralysis; the hills the valleys of a fringe

town whispering salt-mined promises

meanwhile: across millennia of trees and

interstate highway, the long island

mansions & green park and clean street fill

me clean empty-full like the nassau county

eyewitness news 7 and the hum of the

long island express-way the backnoise for

ponzi schem-atic villages their vibrating

anxiety and i love them, the way i love

friends who were never friends in a three-

story estate, should-have-gone there-

should-have-tried-harder; please, prove:

that i want the city because my friends say

i want it, “Complacent,” i say about the

upstate campus, sipping overpriced bub-

ble tea, in 48 hours i’ll be in a yellow valley,

still wondering what complacent means—

(wherever i am i always want to go home)

Isabel Owen is a sophomore English (creative writing) and history double major with a minor in Latin American studies at SUNY Geneseo. She likes to post poems in unexpected places and pretend that she didn’t do it, even though everyone knows that she did.

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by | · 11:29 am

Isabel Owen

 

View from Atop Mount Herzl

The State built Yad Vashem in a winding

way:

emerge

from the museum,

see the glowing, the white hills of Jerusalem,

and a sun a confirmation.

In 1945 my great-grandfather traveled from Brooklyn

to Poland.   Dr. Stern

with a suitcase of surgical supplies and a letter

from Celia in his breast-pocket. Maybe

he saw in the bumps of emaciated rib-bone the white

hills of Jerusalem? Nonlinear conclusions.

Moreso, he must have felt a lacking:

Filling in, the tub in the bathroom of my mother’s

first home   overfilling

soapy suds on a purple-tiled floor & and young laughter

I think about how his serotonin wavered,

more like airport highways than white hills.

I know he kept a garden

in his Queens home

but cried    into mirror glass in old age.

I don’t speak Hebrew but the shema

reminds me of my own

ribcage—smooth flat fatty skin,

the topography of the tri-state.

Moreso I occasionally lay on bathroom tile cold & wonder purple

Isabel Owen is a sophomore English (creative writing) and history double major with a minor in Latin American studies at SUNY Geneseo. She likes to post poems in unexpected places and pretend that she didn’t do it, even though everyone knows that she did.

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