J
Stacie Leatherman

     

And then we chatter fierce,

live wires flipping

lip's shelter,

throat's cave,

I'm not long for another world.

No understanding except seeds,

rind, carvings,

scent and retrievals

the underachievement of the senses

that calls daily for you to bloom,

heal the unwieldy wound that quivers, falls out of itself,

requires tucking back into, pink and obstinate, accidental.

The breeze kicking under thin leaves.

Sometimes I hear clear across train tracks,

now few

the secret

grassy expanses

This.

I have left off where I began.

Backwards as I am forwards

shining,

you see me everywhere all at once scientific and sensuous.

Dive,

foot caught in rope, I'm saved

by accident.

The last time, this time, overhead, aurora.

Consolidated by another being.

Allium, globular, indeed we are circular I bend

back and touch my toes.

Let us be the offertory, the humm-nal, the tune rearranged.

The waiting,

the oblique happiness,

self at seed's end blown out

and leaving the shell

as if washed on a beach

no less

beautiful than 10 lionesses on the flanks and sides of an elephant,

letters and teeth aflame.

I joyous.

Someone picks up after, a relay, the hand off.

The body escapes and escapes depending on context.

Each day one foot in front of the other, which is politics, rebellion.

The quiet accumulations. Of rain, small disasters,

cawings of air, gauzy sky.

Subtleties, misfit interpretations,

perhaps the simplest language is best.

The traffic of grass.

To be precise is to survive, but sometimes the utterance saves you.

A circle opens in all directions.

We move so far away from the internal gestures.

And we become and then we turn,

climb from the land of the living

to the land of the living.

Each being its own narrative.

The sky listing forth. I cringe at the impeccability.

I understand something of danger, the slow knock at the front door,

the usual plagiarisms.

But what is spoken isn't meant to keep.

The fragrance you wear on your wrist is me.

The child wakes like the alphabet,

gestures, scrawls himself into the landscape.

I feel his belief in darkness and sound,

in what happens beneath.

There is no other here.

 

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