Lisa GillMANIFESTATIONS OF THWART AND OPINE FOR CURVED BILL THRASHER AND TOY PIANOListen to Audio Version1/e Read my lips. my mouth is an envelope, sealed yours and mine, some kind of consensual, will part my lips. Even then, merely open. zero? Why not space or void, Pretend you want to hear this. Do you? what if you can't read my lips? More ache. I ache. What can I say that would be transcendental? Should I prove it to you? Here a logarithm, there despair. What if this parting, this frontal separation, What if this is blue, Parting works syllables, necessary Togethering and suchnot is how we eat sky. Duly. Here is no rift. Let me be precise: Electrons spin anyhow. Whirling.
2/City The mind turns to pig iron. Amid sound smack, sun steep, cloud clot, duplex and highrise, all our racked and branded bodies vie and jostle for coveted green teats, gape mouths ready to clamp down hard and suckle. How brittle! How preparatory! Let us all roll over, belly-up, and snort at the sky. A fist-sized ribbon flower in a woman's hair matches the rims marooned on her car. An old man on his way to the methadone clinic still walks with a schoolyard swagger, sagging pants now due to malnutrition. Chronic argh, I stumble. Ingot is a hard word to say. Harder still the blasted memories, the puddling fear of what comes next, what doesn't. We forage preservatives. Anesthesia. Amnesia. Go to the cornerstore, the hospital, the smack dealer, set our faith in row upon row of shelves filled with canned goods. Loss accumulates. So we go. We get in our little vehicles and we get in our big vehicles and we ride a bike or walk, run or take a wheelchair. We go. We go places, we go people, frenetic propulsion, exhausting every last whim, years spat, soot-covered, from wagging tailpipes. Listen how our gridiron goals sing in concert. How we clap one communal hand. Sound of so very much combustion: I curse. So what is intimacy? Another opportunity to melt and be reformed? Truth: I don't know the city and the city doesn't know me. (Will blocks view.) Buildings keep going up, coming down, and going up, and in this we are leveled. Briefcase, backpack, satchel, bedroll, no matter: all our hopes are razed. There are so many ways to harden, so few to shatter properly. Only in anonymity, in the refusal to attach and the utter decomposition of self, will the collarbone turn to motorcycle catspray, the tibia be scraped clean by a cymbal, skin pocked by barking dogs or some announcer at the ball game around the corner. Light light light light. There is something to be said for dissolution. Sometimes I sit on a mat in a quiet room and feel the cells of my own body eroding, toppling one by one onto tectonic plates: everything is shifting.
3/Cure What's broken? Picture this: some giant cottonwood, rings alternately hard-pressed and swelling, record of every drought and monsoon required to tap sky, this tree now splayed, fully stumped by circumstance, and here, in this impromptu midnight, suddenly cleared of day's expectations, we find the chopped circumference of upward motion, this once harrowed happening, to be an invitation we are ready finally to heed, to rest our rumps, lean a bit and accept the curve of shoulders, interplay of fingers, every negative space, molecules of risen river, tracing the contours of our apart and our together, deciphering even the smallest juncture of connection, lips or nape, thigh and shoulder blade. My legs root into the earth, some hot core, and you for a moment balance against me, both of us connected to the substrata of another body, commingled weight carried by tree and earth, our minds cloudlit by city refraction. Who said river? And who said yes? Please. We ex Generate Simple transition from inhale to exhale, Wrapping the room, the planet, Brace yourselves: And this
4/o How grace. The body shaped into O, where breath perpetually bated O lime. Each narrow stairwell, Gasp. An elbow plays the cello; Still. Each cranial fossa remains emptied, Catching up O.
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