saying the names of pictures in the arcaded annals of the Jar

hygienic in the room of my darkness
i humidified
and took the stairs
upon myself to understand
on my belly i was like a snake
i love a good snake, i thought, and reclined

i want to wave wonderfully in something, i thought
upon waking
waving in the waters i think and they lap
a rosetted boat is pink and lifted . . .
i thought about the various conditions of the water
like declensions for architecture
that could be put into the mind with a spoon
or other concave tool below the threshold of Spoon

i wanted the sights that were in it to speak to me more
in German the word for mirror is Seagull

ξ

Kirsten Ihns is the author of sundaey (Propeller Books, 2020). A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is currently a Ph.D. student and Neubauer Presidential Fellow in English at the University of Chicago, where she studies contemporary visual poetics & film, co-curates the cclouds series at The Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, and organizes the Poetry & Poetics Workshop. Individual poems appear in jubilat, Hyperallergic, The Iowa Review, Bennington Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She is from Atlanta, GA and Pensacola, FL.