“
If you keep shining the neon light of analysis and accountability on the tender tissue of your belonging, you make it parched and barren.”
-John O’Donohue
Anam Ċara
Tag: Poetry
little phantom trip
“
Someone has invented this sinister plan: a return to the archaic gaze, a going toward the expectation figured by two blue eyes in the black dust. Silence is temptation and promise. Finale of my initiation. Beginning of every end. It’s of myself I speak. It happens to be necessary to go only once to see if just once again you’ll be granted the vision. We die of fatigue here. We’d rather not move. We’re exhausted. Each bone and each limb recalls its archaic sufferings. We suffer and crawl, dance, we drag ourselves. Someone has promised. It’s of myself I speak. Someone can’t take it anymore.”
-Alejandra Pizarnik
The Galloping Hour
{ }
“
Words do not say the same things they do in prose; the poem no longer aspires to say, only to be. Poetry places communication in brackets in the same way that eroticism brackets reproduction.”
-Octavio Paz
The Double Flame
distant
“
Poetry is the shortest distance between two humans.”
-Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Poetry As Insurgent Art
⌨
“
If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.”
-Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Poetry As Insurgent Art
poems for Pedro
I
it crept
II
taunted by my submission,
hopeless sin love,
I smiled it awake.
III
“almost done”
( ^ nope )
said the woman to the men
carrying the tufted leather couch
to the top of her
glittering
highrise
IV
he took so long to come
but now every capillary
is red and pulsing
V
can’t imagine seeing you
without words
I would want it
VI
everything breathing
VII
she is all I see in an eternal orgy
her face faces eyes
while he’s in her
he, a mystery
but she is me
VIII
he was beautiful
he’s still in me
IX
seashells he brought for me
stained with my ankle’s blood
X
it’s just
sun on a page
until you look away at another man
with a suitcase
XI
as soon as I drank him,
I went into a trance
and knew exactly what to do
oh no my pages run up quite soon
didn’t know he’d take up so much space
XII
let
the
bug
go
XIII
everything else
the ink leaves out
XIV
slowly
he took
his time
with me
XV
doesn’t matter
what I do
it will go
XVI
he wouldn’t want to rush anything
all these weddings around me
a man sprints past
a woman poses
a boy in Doc Martens shamefully stuffs
a plastic checkered picnic blanket
into an overfilled trash bin
a little girl screams
“FLOWERS!”
XVII
all the leaves
I can’t collect or recollect
still fell
XVIII
two men on their way
with a gallon of cooking oil,
preparing love
XIX
eye contact with a skater
as he bombs the hill I climb
it’s all happening in front of me
while I’m busy writing it down
XX
back through
the same alley I entered
of course I can’t breathe
with my nose plugged
XXI
he gave me a poem
✿
“
… I’m more tree than woman. My limbs are old, mean branches. Occasionally a lost flower blossoms on my hand, but quickly withers and drops to the ground.”
-Sabrina Orah Mark
Wild Milk
choking tropics
waiting to depart the room we arrived,
uncertain which gate screens won’t update.
she said it was not a cultural experience,
the maids, the service with a smile,
the menu, prices in U.S. dollars.
excess overflowing the absence
washed-up onshore, discarded at sunrise.
you can have it all on this island in the middle of everywhere.
cloaked women sweep our trace
inhale smoke blown oversea
what a miracle it would be to make it out breathing
in/to
Mental diagnosis felt like an act. A script I shouldn’t have played into. Some do. Some need to. Those whose function cannot find place. Like mine at the time. But I was passing through—turbulent heartbreaks, growing pains, clashes with Hims—and mistook role for reality. I overthought my relation to it, that joy and suffering, and tied it to a being beyond. I regret that now. Or at least can see it as it was: seeking, clenching, grasping. Am I nothing more than a need to reach? Maybe. I’m human. Some childlike essence that shows in contours when ignoring and blurring details of pores. Take off my glasses and focus on the obscure. The fuzz. That uncertainty between me and it. Subject in/to object. Still disoriented in space, lost along the way, I may trip a few times too many, but that’s okay. Because it’s only and not me at all.
heart of glass
A teary night. Heartbroken morning. Put on some tea and sat. Forced myself out the apartment. Biked to the studio. On my way, I noticed a smashed vase in the gutter. Like broken bubbles. The sun hit those curves and even the sharp edges reflected softness into my eyes. It was just a brief glimpse. Thought about stopping to take a photo, to capture the feeling—shattered. With puffy eyes that glistened like all those pieces. But I was late, so I sped past and thought I’d return later. I practiced. Got coffee with some others. Listened to them. We spoke in and out the night before. Removed myself from it. That thisness. And then, as I smiled and waved goodbye, I decided to bike back to that glossy mess and take a photograph, but by the time I returned, it had been swept away. Only one shard remained.
ericaavey.com 