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# Two Poems by Kirsten Ihns
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/two-poems-by-kirsten-ihns/
- Published: 2018-11-07T12:00:31.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:24:24.000Z
- Description: Our poetry editor, Wendy Xu, has selected two poems by Kirsten Ihns for her monthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.
- Author: Wendy Xu
- Tags: Poetry, Hyperallergic Poetry, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-18 14:37 (2018)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/11/img_0996.jpg)

Detail of Hilma af Klint work, currently at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (photo by Elisa Wouk Almino/Hyperallergic)

## sundaey

live footage of the mimic octopus  
gently will i grab its neck  
and twist  
the footage

nobody suspects a thing

i said i was not to swim  
out that far, the sea being full  
of nope  
and sightings

surely with the proper slope would i bear up  
but my slope is very, is sleek, improper  
and i’m so given to release—

can one discharge this symptom  
honorably  
can one discharge it in  
a crowd  
/let me clean my dirty teeth  
the old cat twitches in his sleep

the drab garb of my utmost  
shock technician  
rattles dryly in the dark

he participates in meanings of increasing complexity  
i don’t tell him how to, i just increase it  
we have a rotating thing  
called The President  
and a rule  
called  
do you want me to say enough?  
we pass it back and forth

at the end, the game will ask me for  
/an shelter/  
an jet  
which even such plastic, freaks

## in the door glass

in the loud speech of accidents  
take me swiftly  
to the pierced chute  
encounter is

does that sound bad  
this dog has the tiniest paws, and pink

at the gym a confusion of our image in the door

i wanted to meet her eyes as she entered but did not  
i wanted to put my eyes in the shape of hers  
and did

a prism closes its ends  
by repeating a mantra in the space  
once a crest and once a crest  
/however far the wave will stretch

/when you would study death  
paint flowers

\* \* \*

Kirsten Ihns is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently a PhD student and Neubauer Presidential Fellow at the University of Chicago, where she studies texts that seem to want to be images, reads poetry for *Chicago Review,* and co-curates the emerging artist/poet series *Plexiglas*. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in *Bennington Review, Black Warrior Review, The Iowa Review, Yalobusha Review, inter|rupture, DREGINALD, West Branch Wired,* and elsewhere. She is from Atlanta, GA.

*Readers are encouraged to submit 3–5 poems as a PDF to Wendy Xu for consideration at* [*poetry@hyperallergic.com.*](mailto:poetry@hyperallergic.com)