conversation with the stones of césar vallejo
Rocks land in the Seine. Ripples move
closer, twist arm
back into socket. I hear you
speaking among book
stalls, propped up in their pages, hesitant
casually slouched. Who’s now
in front of a boulangerie, baguette under arm, striding
here into this future that’s already happened?
Thursdays rain down on this Made Thing. Snap
covers shut & the rocks go
plunk. I cannot get you
from me.
**
i could build nothing
Starlings roost
in boned eaves, infect my
dreams, murmur-
ation twisting
through nape & crown. Draw
seams together, de-
forming
through.
Grey, the laced sites of involution, of sentences looking
for bearing. Eye, a mirror or a glass.
Critical trans-
ition: frisson through & up—
What means starlings drag with them.
Lean-tos, nesting in the dendrites, leafed with
detritus, quaking, memory’s pink flowers. Catch
rituals: rings, like echoes,
fading, sometimes, thickening like trees. You
tell it over &
Starlings pitched pain-hum beneath lowing dreams.
Repetition lends a thread to memory.
Image constitutes in a flood of light.
over-
flow: dragging
a corpse that won’t
sink in water.
Then,
“moving, gesture un-
finished,
on,
past”
**
acoustics
Couch history
in large print. Pixels the size of walnuts—to be safe, break
all the reading glasses
in two. Twilight zone mis-
takes : a low voice doesn’t carry better than a saw’s.
The arm that holds on for millennia, a lasting stick. Gregorio Allegri pierces
Wednesday. In book’s laboratory : it took
stories to cushion the
blows. Symbolic versus the feeling
of sentences, diagrammed.
Language, an inflatable mattress : breathed.
**
EMILY HEILKER hails from Atlanta & has an MFA from Brooklyn College. She has previously published in places like Ghost Proposal, Sonora Review, Loose Change Magazine, & The Nottingham Review.
