Aiden Farrell
from good witch
_
no promise excludes
the perseverance of ash.
blood orange dresses waned
in the bedroom upstairs.
windbrush.
sepias.
there was always an emptiness
even when it was her.
nothing, if all else, bound in the speech
that rattles between old wood slats.
pine—a commercially important softwood.
each sentence was a window
she would look through,
leave herself off.
she never saw the garbage man.
she didn’t know his name.
she knew he had one though
because the garbage was collected
at seven a.m. every monday.
from a very young age,
the noise was not heard
but was no less noise.
this meant to a lesser extent
that they were inseparable
and greater that the noise
was there unless sought,
meaning there was a between to be had,
from a very young age.
_
for JoAnne, Gary hid one dot
of red in each landscape.
the dark greens, blues,
deep grays, and yellows.
he did so enough times that when
she couldn’t find one she got to thinking
that he had left it out on purpose
to tease her.
a painting organizes space for people
the way a wall can’t on its own.
with every move furniture is taken
from its natural habitat
of the living room.
box thrones temporarily
gauge the draft.
the corner of the empty living room where
the east and south walls coincide with the ceiling
seeks its echo as if it were affirmation.
the doorways become swellings
through which corpseless gowns dart
pretending to be evidence of ghosts.
the recurrence could not be
referred to as posthumous.
_
JoAnne said that, ideally, some of her ashes
would be scooped into an empty glass
Hellman’s Mayonnaise jar and then thrown
into the north Atlantic from Skaket beach—
a beach that descends into the ocean so gradually
that the shore recedes as far as a mile out at low tide.
porcelain curve of the earth.
the remainder would be planted
in the rose bed out front.
_
the rose bed out front
is one place she could lie—
containing, bearing, bloom.
a pedicel incorporates weight
and suspension into the receptacle.
readies the foundation
to flux in a squall.
the receptacle, thigh-heavy envelope,
adds flanks to the otherwise top-heavy referent.
the sepal is a reverse crown on the bloom
cupping its sweet tension,
like a flying buttress flung out from
the outer rampart of a gothic cathedral—
always more impressive from the rear.
it is hidden.
the ovary is plumpest.
it carries the cradle of its ancestry
in a yellow pelvis and leads
to an affectionate style
that shelters its partner close
inside a mutual midriff.
there is no space left
in the margins.
the love is ideal as they occupy
the same body, yet dormantly.
the lover’s reach is actually inward
but the flower needn’t be aware
for the stretch to be golden.
the stigma is stimulant—
the active ingredient, a flesh-flare,
pollen-rich throb, suspended
mid-blush—to be emptied.
then the pistil builds into something more
than the sum of its parts, creating indiscriminately
and without reserve throughout the garden.
the filament bulges from its receptacle,
fingerling, eventually growing an anther.
there are several per crown
raising stamen.
the petal is at once the introduction,
argument, qualification, and conclusion.
the precision of a tantalizing buffet,
sensitive only to where it has already been touched.
sensitivity is a protrusion
from the earth.
nothing more.
it holds potential.
like the rose bed out front where she lies.
Aiden Farrell is a poet and translator. His translation of The Vitals by Marie de Quatrebarbes received support from the Albertine Translation Fund and the Centre National du Livre. Two full-length translations are forthcoming: The = Sign: Manifesto by Christophe Tarkos, and Vanitas by Marie de Quatrebarbes. Original books of poetry include control (Sputnik & Fizzle, 2026) and lilac lilac (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2023). Work has recently been featured in Tyger Quarterly, Asymptote Journal, SPAM, and Digital Vestiges. With Ry Cook, Aiden co-runs Unnamed, a reading series in Brooklyn.