Kirsten Ihns

IN THE GLADELY VOID

came i up
for new fish, wary          hungry
dj keep me safe in the pink trees please
sometimes i can look
as if blind
not seeing
if you trust me
i’ll provide an answer
i wish to remain in a state of what can happen
and then some other kind of state
like frozen—

i say to a one who would teach my show
i busily dissolve
a tree
in the slip
in my head
i bring before you
with a merely instrument
called thought
and mean to touch
with it—

at the fringes of the car commercial
i grew sad among my characteristics
and grapes of fruit
i felt a thing i could know
and cold
and what had come to pass
like an edible item
ranking most last on a grocery list.

we appreciate revolving doors, flowers,
& special effects

& what do you want? yes.

KIRSTEN IHNS is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a current PhD student and Neubauer Presidential Fellow in English at the University of Chicago, where she studies texts that seem to want to be images, co-curates the emerging poet/artist series Plexiglas, and reads poetry for Chicago Review. Her first book, sundaey, is forthcoming in 2020, and her poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Hyperallergic, The Iowa Review, Prelude, and Yalobusha Review. She is from Atlanta.