You’re Lost in Translation
.          (This poem was created using an online translator.)

I love you. Your
Smooth abdomen: stomach dog,
Is like the young city, arched palm.
It suits into the raindrop.

Your hair is
The purple snakes.
Hair congeals the squirrel
Which dies in the edge.

The water trough oil shoulders you
In the saffron crocus.
Elimination picture dingle hair,
I like morning it, mourning being.

Its dinge close mounting,
Pastes to this bowl,
Small grief:
Your circle pear,

Stingray brown in your helmet
And armor and armor,
Black tarpaulin
Which launches together,

The possible black
To enter the eye tooth
Sugar to be red,
Idea hotly in my
Yellow dark welter

Of thigh clutch.
You trample us
To sing us,
To clean the wheat.

You are a walnut in two,
Palm iris,
Your one half is concentric,
Enters a slow big bread star
To sweep

The dust ceramics,
Smoothly created, the snake
Bit its scale:
The green and the aspen.

The green hangs with you,
Tooth finger,
Digging pit star,
One piece dress.

I love you, purple space,
You bag animal I use.
My support is clean
I shout inside the—

Hotly in ore,
Form already
Enters
You whole.

***

Useless If Told To Me
.
.
.
.
.
The truth behind words is the truth of
the breath from           the body. The words
hold in shape as the body is           shaped, but
the thought behind both is the same. You hold it
even now behind these words too. Do not waste them
as I                have.
Like this.

***

Abacus

You come
like the sun
waking up

a lake
of shimmering
inside you,

your stomach
contracting
like an abacus,

a gag
reflex
of knots.

You come like
heated
atmosphere,

this fault-line
pressure,
an implosion

giving birth
into you
a silence.

You come like
the slow removal
of honey,

each drop beading
a corded heart
unhooded up.

You come
like somebody’s
dollar

whistled at
the crab
In the street,

like walking
about
in a mystery.

I’m walking
over
the earth

two
lips
Waiting.

***

Hannah Rodabaugh has an MA from Miami University and an MFA from Naropa University. She is the author of three chapbooks. She’s had poetry published in Anti-Narrative Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, ROAR Magazine, Horse Less Review, Rat’s Ass Review, and Wire’s Dream Magazine. She was a 2017 Artist in Residence for the National Park Service, and she has received grants from the Idaho Commission on the Arts and the Alexa Rose Foundation.