SurVision Magazine
An international online magazine
that publishes Surrealist poetry in English.
Issue Fourteen
SUSAN LEWIS
She Was Not
prepared for him to swallow her gaze, floating there above her
latest version, barely tethered by that feeble, gleaming thread.
His pupils, hungry & hooded as the secret mouths of caves.
The ambiguity of his interest prickling her skin like poison jelly,
his sylvan tones wavering in the interim – the on-again, off-
again of his electrons masking the tender bits in curiosity,
charging her skin in the fickle breeze. Unable to cabin the slap
& bounce of photons – the spectacle of mornings, the moon,
or the eyes of minor gods – she agreed to snap the line & let
herself go.
For Her Death Day
he came up with a dream by her favorite author, the better to
eavesdrop on the great mind's invention, unfiltered or
reconstructed even by himself. The mechanics were as out of
reach as the workings of any modern miracle. Not so her
arrival in the gnarled core of an ancient oak, where she
encountered a family of crabs weaving daisy chains clattering
with the teeth of the immortals in the grin of the poet
dreaming them: not only the dexterous arthropods and the
deformed tree, but the suggestible explorer and the young man
determined not to lose her to anyone, no matter how real.
Susan Lewis lives in New York City. She is the author of Zoom, winner of the Washington Prize, and ten other books and chapbooks, including Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT. She co-hosts the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Series and is the founder and editor-in-chief of Posit.
