you want to be just like you, but
like, who was that trajectory, anyway
it was like finding a text
and around me nature was being
the kind of person who knew the hunt
for the wolf is the hunt for killing it
and the food was utterly nowhere:
he put the newspaper on the sit
in the meantime
it is either running or not running
these are the things we can know of the fridge
we know them while the size of a world grows under the sentence
in the presence of another with no size at all—
i just know how to be
a force and its empress
kicking my slit in the air:
the girls have learned to swing their legs in a way that is synchronous
they teach us this from the earliest age
– -my devices are the prettiest
of the things i betray—
*
inhabitations
make a copy of the wall
then peel it off
walk out bearing
the room on your shoulders.
i know
if i allow this nail
to grow
it will curl back into my finger
hi there, darling, i’ve come home
to you
fix my constellations from a ladder
arranging the loves and their restrictions
enter each day like
reticulate
area
you will never get free of the people you have
*
stairmaster
the animal goes up the machine
it goes up
the machine of its step order
like a climax
flag on the dune
is it knowing
how to be good
about the come-down, now
hard thing to know
to be good for
*
fix that unfolds in time by means of causes//saying the wrong thing at the
same time//saying contagious object//pithy visual idiolect//peculiar to
street signs//still lives//ticker sticker countdown//parade!
protocol machine cherry i drew through my mind like a figure
and savagely it lets me
savage the long stem
rip
its districted tonal forms
green aureole deep cerise taint rouge and melancholy thick luster
all over
what you wanted is an icicle for the take home
and disappears
as i’ve been here waiting in this glade for years
custard venal limber scented like a lemon incense pure but too thick to be pure
what i wanted is what i wanted doesn’t change not much
lux site
overflood
this:
what i would burn up to have:
flush nervous seething something untrue in this mid winter winter ring—
mind fever beater green dream
but the sun asphodel rose blinking its order center talc coda for which i am standing firm on
the hilly reprise trees
and bitter polypore stick mantra, as bitter wires as a tricked winter
mooring
here is the place Necessitates the Visual Pivot
silk project, dirty penumbra subject to the photobox subject videopool so i come
to negotiate the surface settle my flesh on its sharp angles love it
as a sound that appears and calms to something else entirely:
polyplex, edifice
strapped to the machine of the pleasure
levers, white racket of the strayed
body o what
has fossilized in you
what is there given in this place to do
i eschew the past tense
because the past is just a little to my left relaxed
which original aspect do you wish to resume
as an annelid, but i shed my rungs
-progress -compost -one rich soil
object that listens to the world soft-eared resorbing
each sound as a new richness, new form to be
in pharyngeal futures pushed over
indented
just slightly i find
i want the one i was afraid of
to speak to me
in the stride
of a novel permission
what is it that responds to my attentions
the term in its bright love radiant as any enveloping
*
flot blameless
a room without a heat in it
to people my evening
so i want
to trace the rise of the pvc
so i do, i call you up you let me
watch you in your bath
so fine in the soap, it’s exactly
so you are where the screen is
you are a positive and floating in it
you take the soul out where you can’t seem to carry it
so total in the water
so figure freer than its sense
so strong in this license, i like to do what you want with me
the water is a weak turquoise, but sparkling
it glints a bit where it pools in your ears
as you lean back into you are in the camera oh to be so ready
the only thing it insists on
apple in its early acid
flesh with a wish to dispersion
its very governance
new in its new teeth
blue and the hot kind of vain—
letter to be seen
stamped in it too reflects
the night its sky comes down in chariot, chariot
pitchy green—content to have been carried away
& sweet & utterly rutilated
**
KIRSTEN IHNS is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and will be a Ph.D. student in English Literature at the University of Chicago in the fall. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Black Warrior Review, The Offing, BOAAT, New Delta Review, POOL, Thin Noon, and elsewhere. She is from Atlanta, Georgia.