Consider the active
witness holding
the imprint
of time’s face
on a cloth
at her breast,
her name still
unwritten.
Appearance
Records and their keeping.
Month: July 2023
Situation
Field notes from margins.
Beautiful day. Outside gathering.
A child laughs above you.
A hostile force appears. A toast
offered.
You know the threat when you
hear it. Time to flee again.
But there is a precious item.
You’ve left it inside.
So now you are here, looking.
Looking for it.
Parts and Paintings
Language of forms.
I wanted a language, the artist told us, that felt consistent.
Let me show you, the artist offered. The bodies.
And there they were. Body as image, a cipher to be doubled, dismembered, cradled, lifted, evaded––each exceeding the limits of its own banks, overflowing.
What do you call this one? We asked the artist.
Unfinished, the artist told us. That is why we are here, still looking.
***
Inspired by the work of Salman Toor.
Devices
Analogical selection.
Here is a picture.
Consider it a useful imaginative tool
which, like the hammer,
helps less
when applied to
the wrong situation.
Subaudible Damage
And resistance.
Behind the veil of official information, a justification for maiming, these blows administered at regular intervals by calculated technique for a purpose, and silence effectively shields it.
Here is a hearing aid. Take this stethoscope. Hold it to her.
Listen, wait.
Keep listening.
***
Inspired by the work of Sung Tieu.
Behind the Curve
At the bottom of the lens.
Where is the story to account for waves of squirrel over branch, or this ache reminding there is no way sometimes it seems to reckon with (to recognize?) the way things are and when the fall and the hawk and the fire–––?
No. Look. Stop this.
I am looking. It’s the seeing that won’t come. I remember when sight was like a vision, the undulating body of it, ripe with equal parts recognition and want. Now this spinning, keeping watch, shapeshifting dark. It knows me. But I want to remember the other one. Who laughed and meant it.
Annals
The stories we keep.
Which history? The people, or the book? Language or lens? A soul reveals itself by the memory it keeps. It is less like the cementing of bricks than the stitching of squares. The quilters’ collective eye has its aesthetic aim, an effort of seasonal return. It is a functional art. But to forget either one of these––function or art–––is to make it something else.
No Stranger
Against exile.
Who would draw
these margins drawing
blood press words
into walls except to keep
us from these hands
this here that now whispers
take off your shoes
Anamnesis
From womb.
Beyond
the zone of exclusion,
all thought begins with remembrance
and this renews an order
before the rule of any king,
threading beginning, now,
and ever
in her.
Shelter Lullaby
Praise song for the dancers.
Face buried in her warm bread smell,
I cannonballed into dreams of flying;
she kept watch with one good eye
trained on roaches in the ceiling.
*
As I cannonballed into the next flight
she said Just a little while,
good eye trained on roaches in the ceiling,
in the room beneath the church of the sisters.
*
Just a little while, she said,
bandage over other eye
applied by sisters after landing,
and changed it when she thought I could not see.
*
Bandage over blinded eye,
she left the bed when I slept
to change it somewhere where I could not see,
and then she danced.
*
She left the bed when I slept
for a basement where music played
and then she danced
with the women in a circle, and they laughed.
*
In a basement where music played
danced Leti, and Patrice, Maria and Janae,
these women in a circle and they laughed,
away from the men they had survived.
*
Danced Gina and Kira, Shondra and Renee,
and my mother, and I, for the time being,
away from the men we had survived —
and you should have seen her dance.
_____________
This one first appeared in High Shelf, 2019.