Two Poems
Theadora Siranian

Madam Klüg

How quickly I let myself go.
One day I was there,the next,

I was gone.

My hair had not
always been like that,flying out

from my face like frightened birds.

My hair had always been like that,

since childhood.
I had forgotten.


Teele Square

Some angry fairy
we joked too long
and too loudly about

now runs through the streets
claiming responsibility

for the flash floods
sinking old wooden boats

in basements,

leaving trees bereft
of branches.

All the tomatoes are rotting,
the eggplant

turning in on
itself yellow.

She is wearing us through
with incessant rainand then heat,
bleeding a vein

of chaos into the square,
the fruit flies spontaneously
regenerating: two
by four by sixteen.

And yet the hydrangeas are somehow thriving.

Their acid blue,
paper on the tongue
only blushes
harder in the humid drone
of July.

But even the azure mopheads
of the hardy Endless
Summer
varietal

will succumb eventually,
become mottled
and unloved as
peeling wallpaper,

attractive women defying
the demise of their own beauty,

stripped skin of dying salmon.