Two poems by Will Cordeiro

Winter Stars

The mirrors fatten in the bare white room. Outside, spare branches jewel with tiers of rime. A snowfall’s novas scatter round the house. The slightest swerve from order seems like chaos. The meadowed acres sink with zinc and ochres. Ice cracks: a mocking voice composed of echoes. Each treetop bronzes; daylight’s blond confetti. Whiteout. It’s now tomorrow—yes, already. Silhouettes are Sapphic on the restless drifts. Icicles, hung among the soffits, drip. The field is smooth except one trail of footprints. Moonlight sunders every spark it hoodwinks. Stars glint and spindle in the mind’s rotunda, and night is large and empty, dark with hunger.

Interior Topographies

Gulls swoop and balance over boats that crawl a lake that’s lavished with the overcast, when, looking off, you’ve vanished in a crowd... Streets loop like rumors near the underpass

you’ve followed. One building mirroring another, the tops of towers deliquesce in fog. Light spilt from looming clouds above the water disjoins each face until they’re all a fugue

as you walk farther on an esplanade. As vortices of luster boomerang, each lost wet star coheres into your body— disports a corner where you’re rearranged.

Will Cordeiro was born and raised near Magnolia, Delaware. Will has work published in AGNI, Bennington Review, Best New Poets, Copper Nickel, The Threepenny Review, THRUSH, and elsewhere. Will won the 2019 Able Muse Book Award for Trap Street. Will is also coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Will coedits Eggtooth Editions and currently lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.