Tagvverk

In early 2020, Kristen Gallagher and Tara Nelson began a collaboration working with the large, underexplored collection of lantern slides at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, where Nelson is an archive curator. Periodically, Nelson chooses a group of 3-5 slides and shares images of them with Gallagher, who chooses from among the selection, writes a brief response (under 500 words), and records herself reading it. Nelson then makes a short film featuring the slide and Gallagher’s soundtrack. The idea is to keep things moving, process-oriented, anarchic, quick and dirty, against perfectionism. The plan is to continue the series until every slide in the collection has been included—a goal neither artist will live long enough to accomplish. This project was awarded a 2021 NYSCA Artist’s Grant. Videos from the collaboration can also be found at Air/Light and Dīstantia.

  
I'm in my living room, eating some sardines, increasing my omegas.

Got a little bit of oil from the sardine can on my khakis,

and that’s a bummer.

I'm not sure if that'll come out in the wash.

Sometimes stuff like that comes out in the wash and other times it doesn't.

It can ruin your clothes if it doesn't.

It got close to happening once with my favorite gray t-shirt.

A few months ago, I was frying some food, doing some cooking

and I was wearing my favorite gray t-shirt.

It was a perfect storm of me being too laissez-faire with my favorite shirt.

I should've worn an apron or changed into a different shirt,

a shirt I didn’t give a shit about.

Hey, remember when we were kids and we were painting

and they advised you to bring in one of your dad's old shirts,

like a button shirt that you wear backwards.

I could've done that, even though my dad and I are the same size now.

The point I'm trying to make is that I should have done something.

That's what I'm trying to say.

Because, sure as the wind blows, some grease splattered

on to my shirt, as soon as I added these beautiful lean boneless

skinless chicken thighs to the hot pan.

I remember yelling in a rage that I got grease on my favorite gray shirt.

My then-girlfriend Bernice came running out from the bedroom.

I told her what happened, and she told me to take the shirt off

and so I did. And she started putting a bunch of salt on the shirt

and I'm thinking, "why the fuck is she seasoning my shirt?"

But I'm in the middle of cooking these lean boneless

skinless chicken thighs, and I've got to focus.

And hot grease is still splashing out, hitting my stomach,

my bare chest, and my nipples.

I scream out each time the grease splashes me.

I look over at Bernice, wondering why she's not reacting

to my screams of pain, and it's because she's too focused

on my gray t-shirt which, at this point, seemed fruitless.

She should probably just throw it in the garbage,

because it's probably ruined, but Bernice was now dabbing it with club soda.

And I say to her, "what the fuck are you doing?"

And she's like, "what?" and I’m like, "don't use the club soda!"

and she's says, "I'm trying to save your favorite gray t-shirt."

and I in response say very powerfully, "But, I was going to make mojitos!

I need the club soda for mojitos!" And then fucking Bernice,

you know what she said?

She said, "I thought you promised you were going to quit drinking!"

And I was taken aback. Because I didn't think she was serious about that.

So I said, "I am going to quit drinking.

I was planning to cook us a beautiful meal and have mojitos

as a kind of send-off to drinking. Like one final night of celebration.

That's why I was wearing my favorite shirt, because it was a special occasion."

Bernice stopped scrubbing my shirt and looked really serious.

She said, "I can't believe after everything I said to you last night,

after you came home at 4am with dried blood on your face…"

But as she was talking, I realized that the chicken was burning

and I had to turn away from her, so I could focus on the chicken,

because I was trying to salvage our special dinner.

Bernice yelled at me, "You need to listen to me!"

And I was like, "Babe, hold on. The chicken is burning."

And so, I flipped the birds in the pan, and yeah, they were dark,

but I had managed to save them from burning.

I moved them around in the pan a bit and added some pepper

and that's when I heard the door open and shut.

And I guess that was Bernice's way of breaking up with me.

So mature! The stain did come out of the shirt, thank god.

But now I'm in a very similar situation in the present day

with the sardine oil and my khaki pants.

And I'm all out of club soda because last night I made mojitos again.

So, I don't know. I might be shit out of luck with these khakis,

which sucks. They were my favorite pair of pants.

 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 

Me and My Horse

  
Dear Abby,

I feel like my horse is upset with me.

Yesterday, he refused all hay.

And today he won't even look at me.

I'm afraid to ride to be honest.

Our trust seems splintered.

He's never been violent,

but he's never treated me this way before.

I don't know what I did wrong.

I wish he would learn to speak and tell

me if I did something to offend him.

My gut thinks it has something to do 

when recently we were out on a ride

and a swarm of bees circled my head.

I lost my composure and kicked and pulled 

at the same time. And my horse hated that.

Abby, if you were to Google the phrase,

"what not to do when riding a horse,"

kicking and pulling at the same time

is number 3 on the list.

Number 6 is "showing off"

and I never shown off.

I am actually a pretty bashful rider

because I frequently masturbate while riding my horse.

This is just something I like to do.

It all started, a few months ago,

when I was still reeling from a breakup

and feeling awfully lonesome.

And with the rhythm of the gallop between my legs,

I thought "hey, this feels pretty darn good."

But the best time, the greatest time happened just

the other day when we rode out to Hickshaw Ridge

and I saw the most beautiful sunset I've ever laid eyes on.

The clouds were pink and blackberry and the whole sky

was purple and teal.

It was like I felt the power of the universe

for the first time. A swell of nature's majesty

and that's hot as hell!

So, I started going at it & it felt really great.

It got so intense as I was nearing climax,

I was hootin' and hollarin', fully giving myself over to the sunset,

and that's when my horse started neighing, and rearing, 

standing up on its hind legs. This element 

of danger really pushed my orgasm into the stratosphere.

And I was able to fully let go

of any inhibitions, and the fears of dread that have plagued me

through my recent years.

My eyes stayed transfixed towards the hot pink phenomenon

And that disappearing sun was a portal to not just sex ecstasy, 

but, dare I say, the divine. A real thrill ride!

I headed home as the dusk filled the sky,

taking long drags from my Marlboro Red.

And that's when we ran into all those damn bees!

I would love to get my horse feeling good

again, so I can return to the ridge

and get off on that exquisite reminder of grace

and fragility the universe surrounds us with.

Do you know much about horses?

And if so, what should I do?

I will tend to you like the snapped threads of a broken fan.

 
Maybe don’t *start* w/ how memory fucks us up,
all the lang, some good little days
all papered down, half capable of love, comfort,
one time it was just reassuring ppl from
the double number I did on taste, a body musical I’d disrupt,
& if the fashionable lie of a hotel shone then, as if
to say memories of a drive
& prolly parking, then the big dish-washing locomotive cry
& heavy silence I go to (as go-to)
was a real ex-life thing,
& I was like will
& cried of looking, & C. was a dog-mother
& that was life, horrible but alright
, the Jacks just like cartoons, the grass
so still, the country “ours” again, the Sierras “ours,”
our basement hearts so small, touchy,
all windswept off snow & snowbeam,
& from fatigue, things washed down sick,
& breakfast was a lot of cantaloupe,
dinner all Iroquois,
our notebook trash in brass &
pocket-wrtg on asshole Ed,
in the living delay of grass & afterwards poems
like a grass that needs mown,
backdrop to just basically abuse,
the switch our grammar-measure (a bar the poet walks into),
poems worn like a spacesuit, really, a public’s forum
on being moved by the moving image,
& by July, just nuns & flood-the-gas,
trash outtakes
now caked like likeness lost asleep,
like a lost junkie or gigolo,
there was this party when they asked the face
(past dust), the flighty/excited dress
like hips in ballrooms in the dream,
down dusty stairs w/pleasant little reaching hands,
strolling space & wearing fashion,
& we were just about to kick the bucket,
buy the farm or cash in our chips
—there was a sequence of unavoidable calamities—
or else it was a grand vocab,
words for a house as in the Blackmur narrative,
as bit & brass & sat beside her w/mail
to the heart of middle-fashion,
each noise a little noisier than the last,
so this was just like the movies,
I don’t know if there was more to the lesson than that,
or explanation really won’t much help,
it’s just the common work we later went crazy for,
Ash, Colleen, Mark, Les—TX hippies were basically Masons
or trying mamas or maybe
just burglars casing the joint,
today
it’s funny arabesques, MIX-glistening,
MIX-missed & un-graphed,
someone said we should make the shirt of it,
I hear it now as part of the furniture
(what did a mouth lack, asked a uterus)
, but the last line’s exact, the traffic stopped
for these huge benevolent cows in the dream,
this chasing-ticking feeling of shadow speech
the smiling-brinking boy can’t
at first know as his own heart, being taken for trash—
& goes to earth starting to chase me
over my garden aches, singing trash-country
plus maybe saying some Stevens,
this one time some lit trash jumped
to the pasture & all the neighbors came,
like we’re ghosts to one another when we see each other,
why always rocks/ash/river (gland/strata/deposit),
Joy was a baby she lost she’d sing hymns to
for art, as a kid she’d witness it,
she was “a wonderful witness” she said,
or me I’m just breast-beating & reiterate
that lament was a textual omission, absorbed as of a paltry grief
where the poem’s for high-speed chases instead,
drives erratically then crashes through the courthouse,
I eat & toss
along the basic lay of the land
& then something gets me anyway,
a human regard (grass, light—everything),
“the imposition of showing up as a person,”
where improvising lasts like a brief aside,
it’s when you wash your hands,
all nostalgic for some place,
or it’s slow w/o fiction, thick-heavy w/shape, bass w/o
vibration really, just a background of,
a margin-music, bewildered space
as a kind of lightness (space-waste),
the way I sing w/loudspeakers blasting muzak for ex.,
& some sounds that happen in/as a mouth,
a tendency to living,
remind yourself about that,
like how you been in & around in my lns.
as star-life & stupid lasting poetry,
like the pasture spring, the name-deep classroom
plus just plain loving yourself,
the past explains the present, so for you I’d
wash ashore to hear
where desire/pleasure lurks, oh no,
maybe my best understanding of clarity,
that it was precisely what’s difficult
for me to paraphrase,
cats writing tail-chasing sonnets, & us wandering home, oh,
or I dwelt w/o board, I sat by shady years & ages,
I was born & born by the tented river,
mamas trying after mamas, like life—
oh no mamas (bonneted) stop into a church
& the interest goes, like romance,
some last parenthetical word
I only survive as a reference
to weather, just some shit they threw in, so go tell Bill that’s the measure,
the con was always small (men talking,
free-tongueing Whitman),
or just easy idle chatter aft an aesthetic
easiness in wild Jacques,
a ride on the pleasure horse,
“the non-rapport” I’m over but
that ride in back was sung amplitude,
the name a numb chest coming up
through our pores as bare geological ruin,
great natural
land removes & pastoral greatness parting
on a garden pass, garden scenes where assistants come,
I tell John today how hist. was never much
my thing, just some words like stones the body makes,
glassed down by cameras, mammoth paintings
abt speech as prepared into little earth,
& at the same
plowing grove he’s shooting horses, isn’t he?,
a mustache w/asthma, & earlier
the mind was serious, northerly,
down trees’ years, some basic hitch-eagle
traffic, sticks in place/in pasture,
so thankfully the day wasn’t a loss,
got pizzas & cigs & pistachio gelato,
& this was where the cattle drove the runner,
some trailers shone
up a coast as cost, cast of
the last of body-physics or
ceaseless hungry lang & animal-ship, Homer’s
(superlative) horse, all dust & mouth-pass, all brain
just past the last corner, stand & snort into the wood,
if I let my focus blur I’ll catch their passing forms,
& friends in the grass & mock-
breath, exact as jokes in
the pleasure experiment (for ex.),
to be lately as mine (the love salutation),
a younger person might’ve been more easily seduced,
the come-on saturates then house then grasses,
late-neon workdays, gas & simple double conscience,
the breakfast wig & dinnertime wig/aperitif,
our pronouns plural as a kind of wish
re-assembled on the lawn,
in defense of making just music, as if
buds whistle as dresses moving, as rush
of our/their hearts out there, last prairies grown still over
old/other taste (sought solutions in prose today),
so what if ppl are aching ports, bad lang & living grassland
+ telephone voiceovers, the life past that
of northern plants in view,
& I’m still on a linguistic coast where preachers stop preaching,
Henri’s prose is pure form, better than asshole prose
on assholes, is maybe all I’m getting at,
Christ carrying you on a beach
& in the poems, too: the last 2 lns are a musical awkwardness
& cloudy tribute, there was a want
passing as pleasant aloneness on an open beach
where the tempo refracts, ask around & you’ll find it’s
little tokens of a frenship has gone & us
awaiting updates about breaks in the case I always thought,
how Teresa’s more prayer than precedent,
a spiritual proposition or passage in discourse
(was Julia’s point tonight)—not altogether
elastic, but a real group shirt-shape, waving
folded/feminine prints & country heads—October was
mannered “bastard” poetry & poem waste,
the grass produced in the grass, happy hiding
blind, blasted love underbrush—the glow in anyone’s grass,
pitched wrtg as off-heading space, so I begin all human
like saying “don’t leave” or
how I got from Jean that the mystery’s public
w/the audience as collaborators, the performance
like the way rent transforms a visual art,
there was a family on music-drugs & when they did
German operettas
a counter-bass rang! & chilly wind!
, everywhere I strug & pass & you’re not there,
I’m trying to just casually walk past
art’s intent (publications, gossip),
so here I come w/friends to street topics
as kids sounding an overdub,
all glimmer in glass
like tried-on hats & shades, when tramps made
thriftstore poems in Boulder it was hilarious,
then the Dollar Suite was a station composition,
I break a brick to tease the concert out,
you have words on cassettes, & living w/wrtg as
a country-assed phrase (“lo-o-ove oh love let me”),
the love-magic in Johnny’s attitude as elegy-
to-be-here or something,
then the house lightning, workhorse-in-the-grass or grass
as character in a Scalapino novel,
the beach itself working as nurse or caretaker,
at the rest-stop ppl asking for rain, on turnpikes
& in ln at the coastal passing plateau, so that
I can’t tell am I okay or basically furious,
& the car’s dead oil’s LS again,
babies crying in joy class, hands above shopping bag,
& cop cars passing up over / organized bus-
waiting, flopping like push-grass,
pillows, light
b/w waves &, reading, rows
of surface panic, teargas blasted
/cruising & angry milling
street ppl,
Les Others returning as
le vibraphone, before a heap of gas across a roof (pronounced ‘ruff’),
last night just like that 1 day, 4 times to rehab class,
when Julius was buried just for looking into something
(aft walk at dusk to find bats),
the present become hands in the past, like these
basso clubs, 3 horns/3 bass w/
some added controversy (where’re the hits?),
shortish stanzas in switched-up elegies,
the solitary dream-image of boyish running / pastoral cuts
dressed for ruin in kid tests (for LB’s passing today),
so hold this easy day or two
then read memory as soft casein, or pleasure b/w forms,
a water-repellant mass we ask little of,
the central dread or impasse
(same as use)
& the show’s just talking to us,
we do viewer sequences as social kids,
& when we speak of voice, voice was a real
image-of-life refrain, how I experience pain, for ex.,
or music where llamas sing in the ditches,
sham dolls or how this tragic elder-love creates an ordinary impasse,
we ride bikes to render the romance of persons, superior sex-fights
or big adolescent passion for fixed sleep & passive night, a pastel beach
in popular dark & glassed-in stillness (pride?) now flat
behind clouds,
& life gone out all down around me like a worn sun,
keeping even spigots on bathtubs preoccupied,
love-acting, basically, to reverb on the train,
say living is fussing, but please don’t crowd
that last life in & so-called time in film & western shirts,
8:00 nude flag desecration w/ Bob,
then a souvenir-based laughter,
we mark the holiday w/ withered times & classic anarchism,
big taste, image of tiny TVs ending in sparks,
a struggle towards lap-center as if
I’d, like, lost the confessional, been flung far past hope
-less musing speech I used to could bear, was a pro
& sometimes I’d sing the gone field as abrupter age began,
& words left out like washing,
was prolly just this greeny evidence
that the birds were as yet un
-remembered of an eye, case fabric & nothing-nothing,
me in a corner slouching out past
talk I think, glass looks & missing amazemt,
old ash I frequented in a bookstall
to catalog (basically) couplets, the lord grooms
prose as sextets, but the phrase
that crossed Roseanne was just trying out being pleased of poetry,
they lean in & the poem pronounces
the cloud—structural ash of
light walking as measure,
so corruption’s so easy, it’s all abt. adding uneasiness
against easy fear, sleep
downstairs as the track winds down,
easily & fr confusion of meaning
in the 2^nd chorus, clash of
needs & new mamas we leave,
we sing flat measures in the clash, we outlast our own appeal,
so my favorite track’s fascination, warp as method’s
easy-wide course, okay?, fitting well in the changes,
an easy read like this one I’m also in the mood for,
so I’m out cold, touchable as such—fog’s, um,
somewhere moving faster than us,
as invisible archive of fog parties,
occupied as maps, tangles of
the look the beasts do, the ‘oh
my cryin last,’ or under some flowy nets, the passengers
asleep behind the latch, heave breasts in sleep, “I don’t
mind the mood you leave—& I climb on up on occasion,”
to no repose of gridwork—
foreseen like points among a loss,
easier on voice-wounds I brought & nursed,
so for a minute we cast shadows w/Friederike in the pasture (still in song)
as symphonic order, or at least
that’s how it went in the bananas dream,
halfway asleep thr just anything,
all my connections / bright on every thing
to appear all done
& pleasurable,
grass-like, a room picked-up of Polaroids,
& the great familiar breakfast of, say, rose flowers,
lowercased Charles & something still so pleasure-dirty
in your walk, in sleep, but you asked abt. need—
the wool, the tree, the phrase,
the flesh-place under: these monastics,
whereas other ppl miss the country
& me I’m still pining over these crying-disaster wars,
pleasure’s silent hum’s just heartbreak,
a para-tense of the masculine
or the romance of bright warm days, breakfast,
heat pinning us down as passers in a street,
the music lasts & fades in close-up
so I’m uneasy beneath a formal
exile fr. ease until I basically give up & feel something anyway,
“Ocean Bird (Washup),” the shed where we change
thr. ashes fr. leaves,
earthen grasses nearby,
we pass the days as speaking cameras
w/ notes on viewer-biography,
so the price then’s just our ugliness, trashy novels of
composure pleasure,
harsh light on occasion of practice
in the poetry of some asshole,
on view at the pass, the color
over-passing the view,
in facets in grass, like right alongside it,
& cattle in the film all deathless now along hard work,
as legs at rest,
I wish I was a scrap of wind, hot smoke, breakfast
w/ ideas in space like loudness’s last finale,
I feel it as an outline of our separation
where the day begins w/ cops in class,
the flora does a drag diaspora
fr. today to Sat., someone wants to pass an aimless Maine
so fuck the cops & fuck the kid they wanted,
there’s a awareness of boring lit & the strange ideas of boring lit profs
—we cut & dip like youth & cloud sound from past lives
as a little crucifix against the casual case—we go all contrasty
in the filter-maker piece, a globe has
ours as living forms in knitted space,
the din b/w or during class where
we number lg. events as civil acts on love, & then the band’s together
again & attitude is its common theme,
it’s basically just unbaptism, adoration’s pretty long
if not perpetual, as spendthrift of just
co-signed arms taken up
as costume of value in the film, embarassmt upon effort,
the afternoon’s an easy pass,
lustrous ankle on film, appearing tossed (ankle-to-parasol),
the pasture & the pasture-wife, as I look up
was just the funny jokes we meant to be,
pass always on out past the harrow-ends,
my life as animal/trash gesture,
passing before me like a cup, the dim
-inishing rain of thought passing
like dogs, &, like, you & me
was never there that long but
the disaster is I’m just
still asleep on the phone, the pain lasts like hours,
life & power releasing,
& I thought the pastoral a so-called practice creek,
goodbye to a compass, we emphasize friends
& basic storytelling,
visible branch or classic branching sentence
I write up hills as slopes in memory,
the drama figures are tasks in a sea
or a complex of counter-looking as forest preference,
whatever’s left of someone’s coastal crisis,
fr the get-go to be so livable,
the story I was told was objects
staring out as passing-waiting,
before the weather occasion drags us past the visitor,
down glass edge into parking lot,
they’re using words as shapes, errors,
blasting country tunnels like ants,
like warm-ups for just asking for & giving some notes
(the A-side’s ethnography
but the B-side’s
just these natural sands),
the little century’s turned away fr what it was,
we were fibrous as wool & we founded
a body-health, panoramas, say, a written treatise on torment
washing over ppl’s
roll-call in ash, so
Sunday was a lark I was at,
the world where you refuse (beings/plants)
(in youth) (on tape)
, or this version where
we’ve been working fr. (the funeral) home.

“No?” Who else might care that “As William James put it
a century ago, ‘Nothing includes everything.’” And that
“the word ‘and’ follows along after every sentence.” And
if you’re reading this, I waited by the telephone; you might
have recognized my outline behind the velvet curtains.
And once you said, “This waiting is salt in the wound.”
This is the romance novel I’m named after (William James
called this “a synthetic scheme”). I made myself someone
you might call when the cherries bloomed at Prospect Park.
I waited by the telephone. And the utterance begins “No.”
And so you said, adding the rest.

That last bit was written in a world where substitutes are
always available. As if between takes, I tend to stand by,
deactivated. To this role I bring my love of cliché,
which brings me closer to what we know. In Berkeley I feel
limited to two positions: loving some unloving marble
and waiting to be loved, recording seedlike California valley
quail scattering. The Berkeley City Club’s disapproving
staff. The winter’s inroads on the mellow climate. My mother
extends a fist of pearly knuckles. Translucent and daily. Am I
her? “Not knowing exactly is something I find fascinating.”

The book of love was certainly plagiarized, copied from
the throats of American birds. For example, I noticed
cryptic arrows beneath your seat cushion: experience,
subtext, and a thank-you note. Everyone, someday,
will regret a word spoken in anger to a child, then die
comparing unit prices in a windowless room. With an
eyeball dependent on the inversion of the original picture.
With a love of the derivative and its interoperability.
In an anagram of some stock phrase, you might recognize
my outline.

Frankly, as someone who feels always trapped in a “synthetic
scheme,” I’ve relied on backward glances. Retinal after-effects.
A love of obedience. As the obviousness of night ironizes
the amorous encounter, this morning, I decoded the sidewalk
graffiti. It follows a sunken, meandering creek, shunted
beneath the city sidewalk. Waterways buried in urban landscapes
remind me of my own childhood, and childhood generally. And
today, once again, “today, transfigured leaves individuate
corruption.” From my position, huddled next to a public
telephone, I make illegible notes on the outdoors.

To my point: I feel alert to afterimages, having stared
too long and looked too late. Now the wet paint on my cheek
seems reflected in the window’s predawn dark. Though it’s said
that the life of a leading man drags the leading man along with it,
I see muqarnas above the wainscotting; fingers loosely
interlaced; Ikea flatware scattered across the floor; red wax
from a votive candle frozen to the sideboard. I’ve wish for this
life to be more like a tessellation, where proliferation
adds nothing that might really accumulate. Wherever I’ve lived,
I’ve struggled to see my own bedroom. Only afterimages
on a painted surface. Then, singing begins: delicately, amorously.

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

Poem beginning with the line “My own name struck me like a bullet”

My own name struck me like a bullet
Without one particular fault, lacklustering
You should not have apologized, feeling is art
Technopharmacological comforts – ruined, I felt
comfort

Ruined palaces cannot but advertise
Their walls, I feel their well-versed blank misuse
You are no comfort at all within your means
And I cannot but feel – amphetamine

Without one particular fault, the Paul Klees
Disappear like a hopeless neglected wink
Docents heavy with particulars
Round the amphoralike stair, starry-eyed

The shockfest survives exegesis
Undeified magpie’d divinization

Poem beginning with the line “I’m sorry Marianne, it may be the altitude”

I’m sorry Marianne, it may be the altitude
My finger upraised, my trolley glamourized
I have a serious nature, brow-beaten, too high
A working knowledge of unwholesome winners
I feel

Nonexcellence, not wholesome, raspberries
Accustomed, unaccounted precapitulation
Microcritters, in Cuba & Mexico I enclose
Dearest Marianne, with joy and misunderstandings

Today transfigured leaves individuate corruption
Invalidators and goofazoids, greying not
Graying at the temples, a diagnosis
En plein air, I take my foodstuffs inside

I seem to miss the season every year
Dewinged, unlanguaged matrimonialis

Poem ending with the line “The corrupted darlings went for a nude swim“

Once dismissed, I witnessed Cartoon Network
Circling the celestial orifice
The broken ozone gave a setting
To stage my formless basement play
seed

The ground for opioids to burgeon handsomely
Rebar makes any utopia enhanced
We do know by whose bodies by what lengths
American larpers get deputized

Atilt, in high relief, on the right shoulder
Of despair, more unloaded heavy clips sound
In unhurried air, define the weather
Send us to heaven in a barrel

Save any Tuesday, Tuesday before noon
The corrupted darlings went for a nude swim

Poem ending with the line “The lenses & prisms & the balsam”

The overblunt speechifier watches
Through lenses & prisms, his pewter spoon
Stirring an oversteamed puppucino
I never saw any one idling
So stupidly

I badly want to be counterpresent
An anyman playing unrandom themes
I want so badly to get something good
Done in New York with my binoculars

Did someone put spam in my word salad
A shabby, makeshift, sorry day
I feel myself to be disownably
Watching life through optical instruments

Pale vulgar instruments of every kind
The lenses & prisms & the balsam

SYNCOPE

My worried floor a ceiling, I am low
& close by. The clock’s four digits
have a reverent sum.

The tell is order given, decoy
pitched by a sourceless wake,
angle pushed through segments,
seeking pattern, settling for shape.

The door becomes a wing,
the room its battered crane,
& the drum a hum.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

HEARSE

Memory clenches solid, men clamoring, men quiet like fallen coins. That’s commitment, he insults me. True, I wanted to be everybody you touched at once. I wanted to slam the door open and the gale to pin us both. Life goes on, my quarter sticks in the slot, dream machines sieve fine the soil of your plot.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

GO LONG

Where I’m frank, I can’t keep doing this; why the receptor shivers, bears its shoulder against the door. Who lives, who ties up the excess of strings, who welds the circle back into place? Into columns, the words frightened into shape, into prizefighting the press and, hapless, reversed. My foot fused to my rushing mouth. Contained, can’t take it, the gutting against the structure. Lieu of hail untouched by the wipers. And there’s trouble below. Go long.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

PULLING

These landscapes fill to coherence and combust upon exposure. The eye is a doctor, pockets of gauze, unavailable for the foreseeable future. Any figure would recede, a square into plaid, if I could anticipate the failure of my hands. If I could mete out my dexterity, find its average and distribute. Instead, a city on red waters, pointe shoes hanging from a post on the dock, birds reappearing where the stars dry clear. The snake swallows the house, the glue loses stick, the exit is right here.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

ONEDRIVE

Preset names rig the pictures together. A tear in the linchpin, its eye gone transparent; why wry, raised voice? The ilk which one settles upon. It’s on her like pollen, like her head on her neck. It’s near her like an adjacent well. The bridge is clear but the air is misty and together they are stark.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

IPHIGENIA’S MOSAIC

Tell me what taps my way

on thousands of rubies
chafed to a surface.

When the weight is enough, where

the face comes off
with pressure, where

the pillar breaks the picture,
why the plan has changed again.

Tell me lodestone to lodestone

the distance I pend, the color
and powder of my streak

when scraped, and
the genius I apple for

used to say slough like slow but more
ow, not slough like trough, or slough like slew,
but slough like snuff, like death’s voyeur.

violence or knowledge might be the throughline.
knowledge grasped through violence.

the things i’ve learned: epitome is not pronounced
like tome, but me. what’s found at the base
of the scalp is scorn. secrets are visible beneath the nails.

light is not the only directional. the body is to be
listened to. commands are avoidable.

everything you run from will find you.
what’s waiting for you outside the window
can be found behind the mirror.

if you reach inside yourself eventually you’ll find truth.
the body is tangible but the self is not.

the only thing worth repeating is
everything. last night, i watched myself open
and wished myself closed. daybreak taught me

regret. moonlight taught me consequence.
afternoon heat bled into me, taught me to resist.

water taught me imperfect reflection, taught me slake,
taught me slow. i haven’t learned anything
well enough to pause.

i learn best from the sediment glow
held in my throat. burn. smoke.

the voice of me was born in the coal forest.
the rest of me was born in absence.
i don’t know where all i’ve been,

but i know the names that each place called me.
every definition of till has homed me. land. time.
supply. i’m still learning.

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

fear and what makes it

it’s not that i’m afraid of dying, i’m just afraid
of what comes after. not afraid of heights, just falling.

not afraid of ghosts, just hauntings. not the dark,
just what’s in it. not what’s gone, what’s left behind.

both everything and the concept of nothingness.

never played bloody mary or ouija. hid under blankets,
not sheets. convinced myself thinking about dead people

meant they could hear you. never stopped believing,
think of them at the worst times. a ghost can be anything

that lingers longer than its welcome, i’ve always known this.

any shadow longer than the light. anything moving
while you’re asleep. anything that wakes before you do.

anything eliciting fear. etc. i’m not afraid of being alone,
just being left. i’ve ghosted and been ghosted and so it goes.

i’m not haunted by memories, just remembering.
i’m not haunted, just feel a presence. it never leaves.

not when i check the mirror and see nothing,
not when i look behind me and see nothing,

not when i lock and unlock and lock my door,

not when i test the knob, not when i check the peephole.
i watch myself weep and know i’m not the only one.

i cover the cameras because i know there are eyes behind them.

when i hear wailing it comes from inside me. when i hear whispers
it’s often my own. when i lose time i know where it goes.

when i lose myself i know who takes it.

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

my brother; bronzed grackle

here we are again, two sides of the mirror.

i still hear the desperation in your voice as you beg
i still wonder— here, there’s no need for wonder.

i shed my fear like an overwarm coat. i followed
the tether of your voice into the dark sea. we
were two bodies floating. i lent you a life raft

and you took it. the voice from beneath the water
was a stranger’s. muffled by lungs full of what
does not belong. brother, can you swim?

short distances, maybe. when you were young
you filled my lungs with chlorine, didn’t blink.

the coin of your eye like the moon disappears.

nothing to guide us out of the water. brother,
are you drowning? are you wading or waiting
for me to pull you out? here we are, two sides
of the mirror. you above water and me below

or me above and you below and both of us
trading water for air back and forth. brother,
i do not know how to save you. i do not know

where you’re going or how to follow. brother,
here, in this dream, i broke through my fear
like the surface, gasping for air, hands flailing

reaching for you, my shore. and you reaching
for me in the distance. both of us searching
for land. brother, have you landed? how far
must we go to find shore? i heard your voice

today and it came so close to breaking me
out of this dream i’ve been stuck in since
that night you called. brother, i’m tired

of treading water, relaying messages, replaying
the fear that led you where you are. the release
of air into what could hold it was all you needed
and hearing the shatter of your voice, i refused.

brother, forgive me. neither of us know how to
swim. neither of us have webbed feet. enter the
water only in search of what could sustain us.

brother, nothing can sustain us for long enough.

brother, the water cannot hold us, but neither
can the ground. brother, do you know what

it feels like to carry wind beneath you? brother,
you have outran everything that’s ever chased
us and still been caught. brother, does your cage

remind you of who put you there? brother, do
you blame me? brother, do you think about
that night, the water in your lungs and me

drowning in my fear? brother, have you ever
feared me? brother, have you ever seen me

in your reflection and been scared? brother, have
you ever scared yourself? brother, are you there?

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PERSONAL FREEDOM, EVASION, AND INVASION
after Abbie Kiefer

because my life is unmoored, my schedule is unknown. because my schedule is unknown, my mother has scheduled video visits with my brother during my last two workshops. because my workshops are reducing my credit debt, i have chosen them over my brother. because my brother is in prison, i must choose between him and my schedule. because i have chosen my life over my brother’s, i’m reduced to guilt. because i have never been anything but guilty, this is not uncommon. because i define guilt as emotion rather than sentence, i must acknowledge the distance between my life and my brother’s. because there is distance between our lives, my brother is in prison. because i blame myself for my brother’s imprisonment, my life is on pause. because my life is on pause, i have no requirements. because i have no requirements, my life is unmoored. because my life is unmoored, i am here, i am writing, i am performing the act known as creation. because creation comes naturally to me, it doesn’t feel like a celebratory feat. because i do not know how to celebrate my creation, i discount myself. because i discount myself, i devalue myself. because i devalue myself, i reduce my workshops to their effect on my credit debt. because my credit debt is constantly accruing, i reduce everything to its effect on my credit debt. because i get daily emails asking if i want to raise my credit limit, i am constantly thinking about my credit score. because i am constantly thinking about my credit score, i am constantly thinking about money. because money is needed to live, i reduce the concept of living to what i can afford. because i cannot afford to live, i rack up credit debt. because i want to live a life i enjoy, i ignore my credit debt. because i ignore my credit debt, i choose only credit cards with introductory no interest. because i choose cards with no interest, my debt doesn’t feel like debt. because the no interest period ends, my debt begins to feel like debt. once my debt begins to feel like debt, i begin chasing my tail trying to reduce it. because i am not a dog, i know what to do once i catch my tail. once i catch the tail of my credit debt, i clench it between my teeth, i search for a card with no interest, i open a new line of credit. i don’t know when i forgot my brother in this poem, but here at the end, i remember.

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

solar system inhabited

planet sickness: stark. a web of scars, a volatile
surface. a year is three days. the sun comes out once
in two years. in a lifetime, ten days of light. life
unsustainable. sleepless, sick, forsaken, lost.

planet health: transient. a habitable
surface. a year is a year, everything is
what you expect. give it time, you will
lose what you thought was permanent.

planet between sickness and health: an unbreathable
surface. fluid in the air, in the lungs. crushing weight. once,
a year consisted of two nights. now a year consists of constant
empty loss. temporary, passing, essential, trapped.