TWO POEMS

ON ICE

They slept in an empty bed together in a glass cube

of a hotel, maximally anonymous and crystalline.

In the morning, when he was gone, she ordered

some fruit salad and half-ate it. The bath overflowed

onto the white marble floor as she lay counting

the mosaic tiles on the wall. Shades of white in a pattern,

like patchwork fields of different varieties of snow. 

There was no witness, save a round mirror's cold impartial eye,

and a black spider in its web in a high corner, indifferent

as an alien god or a surveillance camera. Her stained white

coffee cup sat by the bathroom sink, and a white satin

nightdress on the bed drooped like a deflated phantom.

THE MORNING AFTER THE WEDDING

My twin sister, my mismatched shoe, is still sleeping

in the neoclassical wooden house with peeling white columns.

Night retreats like an ice age, an epoch of amnesia.

The light is chlorinated, washing over the rows of chairs

on the lawn that were swept by wind into drunken waves.

Small stones pulverized by the breakers of daylight tumble

slowly underfoot. I remember I'm not sad in blue light,

this just-dawn aquarium glazing. A feeling like the tangled

chains in my jewelry box finally unknotting. I hear

the brown bear cantering through the nameless woods,

and the secrets the trees exchange like mothers talking hushedly

over the small, uncomprehending heads of children.

Rowyda Amin was born in Newfoundland, Canada to parents of Saudi Arabian and Irish origin, has lived in Riyadh and London and is now based in New York City. Her poetry has appeared in two chapbooks, Desert Sunflowers (flipped eye) and We Go Wandering at Night and Are Consumed by Fire (Sidekick Books), in magazines including the New England Review, swamp pink, and the Beloit Poetry Journal, and in anthologies including Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets (Bloodaxe Books).