Chora
Our sound is translucent, soft, watery, crushed between
fingers softly pulped, whispers in our ear porous litany—
skyline netted white, color blotted out of anything that
stands still, fruit bright against pasted-down surfaces, masks
half-rotating, our sound flickers—we want to oscillate.
Shelters pile atop one another, tunnels and dwelling places
along the river, eating small things that reproduce quickly—
hatchlings fall onto floors and adolescents molt, crunch
underfoot as we sift through fruit with membranes strung
between their innards, suspended inside the sac by fleshy
threads, dark bulbs and vivid globules, encased milks.
Our sound, prism of organisms, bristling pustules of metallic
silver plastic rounden from the pore and roll away—we can
feel each cavity, all our microplastic condensed against
malignant vapors exuding each deserted stair.
Ghosts have been carving holes in the walls—light the shape
of crescents falls in, underneath our feet and beyond
that gray earth slips into the outside, sinkholes open and
swallow trusting ghosts—fountains appear where they were,
three-dimensional forms of the lost.
Blue vapor flaking around pool edges hold their form like
water supports them—at dusk a window opens to hills and
clouds—outside appears, a vision of distance in proximity,
illuminated as a ring around your head my hands are
next to your hands by our sides.
Each time we die we divide—our first death, larvae and amber
illuminated water, sound of movement through the language
of before—you died and the ghosts corporealized,
sinkholes and fountains.
We fold data into our hands, infinitesimal alighting clear and
green message larvae jibbish and wander, larvae enmesh,
temporally secondary, larvae organs visible skin, larvae that
glow when you bless them, a pantheon of names
—there are small fountains, too.
We were briefly encased, breath condensed in a gestational
sac dangling from our sound, filled tick—we died and shed it
with our husk, dream of cells repeating, remains abutting an
endless landfill of outside lack-enveloped scent of living
dying surrounded by plastic, a gradient of turning plastic.
Our lack becomes someone else—you scatter a droplet,
pattern a scatter of a droplet—a ghost says the rest of our
lives and we remember time passed, scaffold fallen varieties
grafted to grow where sound drips and messages
hang densely in a cluster.
Waking dawn wide-eyed petal-edged larvae, lichened stair,
stained glass window rouges, friction under our husks—we
press ourselves against, endless throb chewing, mask tearing,
fibrous stalks emerge we crystalline and devour, inhale and
our wings creak, salivate, a paste absorbed through the skin.
Desire adulates ghosts—a ghost speaks directly to our name,
mercurial rings, bridge between their eyes and fingers—
sound blistered with stars beamed purely, voice deepening
down down down to the bottom of the well—wings lengthen
all their eyes wide, what remains in the world since our forms
died at once together.
Breach swallowing sound, looking-listening symbolic organ,
feel them duplicate, smoke filled vesicles that burst, rising a
maw odor of blood rough touch sliced core, your whole form
down our throat—you drowned, turning small pale interior
vegetal longing condensed in astriction of.
Your sound gone tall and sonorous, pliable to swell, collected
held-dears look-feel like stacked stones, laid stones, stones
suspended archway, a ghost reappears and reminds us who
killed the world—the breach never fills, metallic and burled
thicket, larvae pour over the edge and are not seen again.
Undoing works its way through, ghost ministrations
fulminate, shockwave enclosed system—a ghost opens a
crescent, cohort trust a feature, sleep a full cycle wrapped in
loneliness, step backward stair turns, redirected into ethos—
fearful impulse apace response, your pain second skin.
Submerged, gone translucent so perfused, chime units of
meaning, stutter exuberance, flooded by touch—our mask’s
capillaries swell, part a ridge in the brink, outside visible
through a parted wall of water, ground above us ceaseless—
wing vanes conjoining, tears incessant, eyes turn pores,
bridges dissolve, appendages to limb and flank, cheek and
collarbone, flat scapula softening, pouring into
sternum, subutized birthmarks.
Collecting steadily, sorrows fingertip—your body tried to die,
flung from heights and slow poisoning—rising body, fluid
swollen, circumnavigating laughter runs, our dual pupils
coagulate—we pull earth out of the ground, knuckling
density, floating in a suffuse of virtue and ferment.
Gestural patterns, withheld intimacies affixed below the
surface, entered world chewing on itself—we turn to foam
to presence, need for silence, a counterweight—a tunnel
lengthens below us, skin dipped absent vulnerable point,
circular negative, cohort pollened with reproduction, soft
offerings loam from us—a vision of you lattices mercilessly
—we chew the tubercle, epithelial cells, wad of sap,
sugars release, travel subcutaneously.
Dipped in inside-turned-outside enact initiate towards,
vibrating cohort permeated, breed flicker at the ends,
unfolded diagram silence vowels and perambulations—we
briefly disintegrate, materialized with cold, dominated by the
principle against upon our outraged body insists—we can
hear the deep and hollow sound, the sound of the world
ending itself the ending worlding itself the feeling and
conscious body of the bodies of the world.
We try to draw the cohort closer, feel the transmission,
resemblance misstep a hereafter, listening language suns
bleed together at the lip—our contradictions snare, dissonant
curdling, vitriolic bitters, unidentifiable ambrosia—we exude
process errors repair coincident paths.
Machines clamber our shoulder, pool oils of shame and whir
in our ear to keep moving, manufacture units of exchange,
invent metrics of worth, facsimile thought detritus—
suspicions proliferate, blind spots form as the mechanisms
increase, variables and information limit, scents change in
some technical rearrangement of chemicals.
Machines tap at themselves in a rhythm of tuned teeth, our
umbilicals connect us sheathed with tears, each connected at
grief, thronged with blood commingling at the hyphen—we
fracture, suffering perfuses rising to our chest, words emerge
an echoic origin—undesired self, reflection averse, heavy
overture, distance inside age when fear enters—lanced worry,
lost in a dream refrain redoubt, something to remember by,
objects of imagination and dread, distant selves, frustrated
impulses, a ravine, nothing is anything else.
At the center of the core of the earth, entangled molecules
ground underfoot infinitely more minute, never disappearing
parts melted and reformed infinitely, thousands of years in
an ounce—another enclosure approaches—you walks with it,
inner world circling their feet, an origin story.
Another you, wall-enclosed heroic scale of inner weeping,
protecting machines, soft places visible in the way you cross
gestures, refract and sticking—soft voiced and mossen,
vascular knowledge finely wrought, many tongued, deep
ideogram, mouth sounds eke out desirous communication.
Newly born you, carved wings still lacquered, discerning
rightly, pustulate, secretions in the air between us, signalers
pass through enclosure membranes, near to touching,
mechanisms vying on transparent outgrowths to draw
us closer at our warp and truing centers.
Pain radiates to the limits of its sound, inarticulable, nothing
that can be touched, undulates against restless, talking to
itself in a tremulous loop—our enclosures attract, break
together, core beneath us widening, objects of
nurturance imparted and named.
Many-sided objects travel with us, geometries bloom from
the undergrowth, minutes in our cells, skin, seasons cluster
tight furled sweeten the color, suddenly visible, connect to
rhythmic mirroring and withholding, lapse in and out of,
remains interred, futures intersecting moments when we
may have died or lived and who was beside us then.
Thresholds approximate at our surface, agonized stillness
where longing resides, undone runs through, populations
flush, conversations fill the enclosures, overlap pasts
extending backwards to a fixed point in the collision of dust
—soft purpling, unholdable, soured in the close please woe.
Fountains hover above us, sound of collapsing end times,
after life, bright things extinguish, pulverized from flesh
into echoes, point source contamination ripening,
branchial cavities void, anticipation drip,
each membrane thins before it breaks.
You whispers of foregone places, discrete and parallel
stairways, irreplaceable wolds—trod internal terrain,
continuous fields of unspoken proximity duplicates
meaning, sembling phenomena, intoned refrain, scent
exuding from crushed open places, coaxed
forth sudden low lying ground.
Withdrawn forfeitures of reciprocity, abandoned unbeholden
realm, weight of bone ash, ruptures and connections form-
unform across the void, deepen into surfaces, appearances,
representations of and of and of, cut open suns apricot and
melon, fuming a portal to half-lit density—you close
the nictitating membrane.
Digitate or filiform harbingers spread through our skin,
polydactyl, keloidal outgrowing repetition on our crooked
mile, lies vaporize as a false horizon, suspended above
hypogeous bouquets of self, gathering in corners—
stories and images, days it rained.
Language pours into us, nothing molecules, obfuscated
multiplied receptacles—pulsating and budded dusk silts trace
overflows—offer an open infinitesimal trust confluence,
where we pull closer in, slung tethers poison on a sharp tip,
eat up the cultivars, bulbous irritant, near world-making held
in place—individuate distance and non-descendent young.
Our unanswered question, idolized pixels lit skyline turned
perfect, enraptured attention, fixed gaze, break it open and
name all our parts that die, unknown interaction, rapid
change sequence—common gesture place name pattern,
inexpressibly specific tongues, meanings of the word.
Shapes rearticulate obscure quality of suffering, navigable
unrequited—manipulations of worship absence susceptible
enclosures, omit intervening, thoughts react,
clabber into new bonds.
We pluck at the unyielding companion, adhesive mouthpart
latched on elsewith, we hallucinate contact, penetration,
reciprocity wandering, inseminated, fruit appears on our
tactile sensory opening, smooth muscle contractions and
ducts, neural architecture extended to each wild plum.
Gods appear, spirit-drenched to the stone, vying for our
dozen hands, each self-carved walk, contradictory wreath
and grenadine judgment, twist our orbits together, a god
drips harmony sought a common note, shivering out in our
naked gorgeous, deformed and gelatin.
Gods split us like a hair, lay their eggs marbled want—god of
rot, an end that becomes a stair, rush heated oblivion, killing
underfoot mercies chase round dense wisdoms perish to
something else—god drawn to obscene blue
light emitting indelible diodes.
One of us pales from a god bite, swollen holographs empty
places near and beside and through us—gods made of
malformed undertakings flash gracious, remade cathected
walls, inbetweenness, palpable callous irises thickly,
pendulous with choices.
The deep and hollow sound shatters our delirium turn face
lightning, touch the ground, fingertips absence of
bioturbation or actuated penetration cavity expansion or
volvating multi-shelled chitons, no stridulation or honest
signals—our overlapped enclosures, perilous carry ardent
burning, drenched sulfuric loss, achromatized morass,
living rigored to semblance.
There are no predatory responses left, pathogenic grief
sensitivity, our body stuff roils at the abstract spatial pattern
lack, distorted and dilating relation—our visions bifurcate,
cluster sticky yellow flowers, ounces of nectar, names we
confuse for being, skin forming contamination bond,
places of trust.
Ferment spills each god, larvae suspended, preserved
succulent purity held close, smell of biofilm, we inhale
warm, thought gauze clung between, shiver radula,
infinitesimal bells, lack dampening sulfides ring clear
—our taut and softened sounds, tender albumen,
river conjoined.
Wells fill slake gleaming refraction ladled over dedicated
transduction mechanisms elicit excitation responses god,
lubricated tissues mouth sound variants for uninjured
seedlings, pith center cells revelating change, cut to burst,
medullary rays transport from center to periphery.
Ruinous dust lost apostolic control, eternally declinated
fruits, degraded and assimilated, turned to living soil,
petroleum-derived polymer gone residual fairy ring—
propagules streams, filtration beds ingest fresh meal,
nimbed and dissymmetrical violet faces, adorned in
carnelian, amethyst, topaz, garnet, flowers and stars.
Pressure gradients expanding atmospheric lungs, fiber optic
cable nervous system, aquifers refill weeping, artificial reefs
clung tunicates, filter feed crumbled stairs, collapsed risers
and landings turned decomposition sheen, horizoned angelic
order, invertebrate pore bearers remoldable sponge
merge backwards birth unwalled.
Feeling permeates the grid, collective gaze organs manipulate
light convergent focus—carbon shelled bivalves reproduce
billions, filter images accumulate calcified refusal, spirits
breakwater while attention microbes toward decomposition,
nutrient overabundance bloomed algael shone through
with undissolved oxygen.
Our tears protein thickened fertilize pseudopod relation-
specific seeing, wooded paths ripple memorial, encircled
songs—fevered growing seasons extend, languages fall into
the sea, smallest units of color appear enmeshed cobalt
ganglia, internal divisions unspeakable fault, multipotent
memories swarm doubling time, misfolded.
Nociception reifies collective matter, inevitable pathways—
winding potentialities into states of firmament,
luminary perturbations together, half-open,
entering at any arcsecond.
Fruit turns large strawberry dense scented, symbols tale,
warmed in the mouth, caress tympanum, mechanoreceptors
flicker brought about light, saponify to divine reflections.
Sweet nightingale frothed intimate vibratory radii—years
adjacent rooms filled with sunflowers, souls tender age
remember our bodies intonation, concentric.
**
JESSICA RAE ELSAESSER is a poet whose recent works have been included in Salutations by RVNG Intl., Completely and Without Pause – Feminist Notes on Oppression and Expansion, Thou Who Holds but Owns Not by TLTRPreß, Looking for you by Du-Good Press, and DAISYWORLD MAGAZINE #2. They co-founded A Wrecked Tangle Press, publishing small edition artist’s books from 2008-2018. Their current self-publishing project, Place of the Linden, collaborates with the work of Lindsey Ann Elsaesser.
