Face / Off
I.
in a spell of letters
a pivot points blank
zone
as much as a calyx
as much as petals
meant to me
in my chicago unbecoming alone
hollowed to sound: patterns
as far as I am
as much as the meter
or music terms
I forget them in songs quicksand
eddies word leaves a bird
-quakes b/t
a film abt vincent price the lone
liest man in the galaxy: vampires
a truncated word
a seeled cosmos
an alveole method of eating
selfsame otherskies
I disgorge
as lodes up to earth
ores in the veins
mirror mirror divulges
my sunk weight
a nought angel
nulls central it
harp-strings
a locus in pause
I arrive after myself
body bandaged body
this turns out
skeletons inverse: gutted
horses were my parents
orphans cardinal
direction
& in compasses in
my vocal chords strayed
littoral partitions a cutout at sea
rain bow peg boards flat
redoubles grace
notes & pitchnow
hitch yr wagons
up to this: bis
dis arms world all
misblossom talk
talks to itself
same telluric :: earth
rock gnaws a way
II. in still strips
my face / off
*
Saggars Behind You
Sometimes it’s finished when you
Just crystallize me w out
Slip coating
Or burnishing blacken b/t
A porous world – ball
Clay, yr back:
Coils, earth wares
Under thermal shock, retracted
To the pt of hands
My middle, centering technics
You tonsil blurred under water
Slushverse & cirrus white slurs on
Slipinside a flux: yr murk shapes
& still bracketwater
Joints into clay, cracks re articulate
To Scatter brick teemed or
throes aside you
Oven mouth holes
vein-leaf-finger
To palm it figured us out
Side tempos, hollow where
Flames pulse so thrust you
Past over glazed, my sight
stakes out, wedge Anew
phantom earth saggars wherestone
torn out
*
They Live Too
repeat elysian in tones
blood-roped blood
lasso pulls thru
we wind down behind
sun sets lost strains
dust sifts bowl
basin grows out
big as outside: other
world underneath
kneels its cosmic
beatdown the land
all:
my mirror image likeness, unsky
my god space
expels or ejects – void untill
my aisles of body congeal
this is a tone
stutter it outre
you pass the haunted stars w yr
voice access voice
then pierce it blood
writhed into floors too
that laid the plains down
back on our knees, four
square then there cattle counterfeits
my blood buds :: uppercloud
it stamens â pierces me
shatter fare â this anneals
or tempers into a weather
machines
you ground out of : shimmer
like whittling into
wind b/t â slices of
airlost planes
a horse w o
color, you drive it in
countering: brooks still
idyll
**
JESSICA K BAER received their BA in Creative Writing from Georgia State University in 2011. They live and do field recordings in Chicago. Their work has been featured in Fruita Pulp, Horse Less Review, Deluge, Prelude, The Boiler Journal, Potluck Mag, and Sugar Mule. They also have a future chapbook with Magic Helicopter Press called Holodeck One (2016). They have a lifetime ban from Whole Foods and love horses.
