Daniela Olszewska

Sleeping Pill

1.  Drink 8(0) glasses of water.

2.  Unhook the sun(set) on your ceiling.

3.   Let the th(ought) w(r)ench clean herself.

4a.   (Re)Petal the figures in the land(e)scape.

4b.   Or, (de)press the petals in a circular frame.

5.   Visualize the (ex-)tracks of an albino rabbit.

6.   Open a mouth or an eye and let a (h)om(e) architect itself around you

Immigrant Song #6

Here’s a candy dish shaped like a rooster.
And here’s the collection of cubic zirconium.
The extended family is four-leafed, curled
up on the Goodwill couch.  Avoiding the bottoms
of teacups, gazing at the laminated blackbirds,
the sundials, the red wooden eggs.








Heroine

You escaped from the relative safety
of black and white film   Brain-
sore, collector of pirate flags,
you spent the night in a light house
of cards.   Drew their attention
w/a penknife   Peeled off your skin
+ breathed in all the airborne, careworn
correlations.  The feelings catch themselves
in fractions of color.  You jumped
over the skyline, catching the loop
of your hair bow on one of the Sears
Tower’s lighting rods.








Immigrant Song #12

My real language is made up of death-shaped consonants.
I keep them locked in a concrete box in the back of my
roped throat.  Forked tongue, mentholated song. Bird
feathers glue-gunned to the edges of my passport.

Daniela Olszewska was born in Wroclaw, Poland and grew up in and around Chicago.  She is on the editorial board of Columbia Poetry Review and an intern for a new feminist poetry press called Switchback Books.  Her work has previously appeared in Keep Going.

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