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Poetry

three

 

                                      macrobiotic confessional

                                                      ‘Our hands imbibe like roots, so I place them
                                                      on what is beautiful in this world’
                                                                                                           St. Francis

 

 

 

 

roses from Ethiopia

              A thorny equinox and I’ve been serially felled
once because of animal husbandry, again because tired and saggèd
withal while shopping for carbonic roses as a cure-all.

We the people let’s not asphyxiate in a cocoon of doom, our union
a bursting chrysalis of trauma minus butterflies.

In holy moods near the bacon section all about martyrdom I’m
distracted by a Ganymede courting ground beef. Spying the
contents of his basket, I try to detect if he is taken. (I imagine his
robust blood, his man at home, their holidays near water.)

So many times I’ve held my breath today: covering nose and mouth
with my shirt. The usual sensory impasse emergency!

On Houston Street a million-wheel truck chugs past churning
everything up for me to inhale. A purple band-aid on my ankle
covers a portal for bacteria. It took three or four days of self-
ministration ’til the acv cured maybe-MRSA idk.

I get acupuncture. The clinic door is open to the Superfund traffic
bad vibes cig-bog o’ Greenpoint. When I ask if I can close
the door, I’m showing them their oversight.

Finally she sees me she takes my pulse she reads my lingua she
gives me thirteen needles, one atop my head for dumniss.

My bane seeping out of each exit I’m off-gassing in gradual bliss.
Pressure hovers: that feeling of pre-touch an itch of contact is
extrasensory spread&release.

I’m semi-waiting for the wound to close, for the angelic body to
exhale meta-bodies to scatter and uncluster flocks of priceless
birds

past the celestial equator
dispersing mid-air

I secede                                                            oh look
                                                                                        oh look
                                                                                                      oh look!

 

 

 

three mornings                   (via Philip Whalen)

                                     I wake up | big whoop
                  It’s 7:27am, solar. I put on a bathing suit.
                 Why not. A little fun
                 before the slog. No one
                                            has to know.
                 My autonomy swims with itself—
                 I’m taking in the scenery,
                                   praying to the pine cone
                 rainbow prism crystal, the mystics,
                 lone dog peony heavy
                                   with longing
                 I can tell this day’s amenable
                                              to leisurely religion,
                                   the kind that makes
                                   for a good time

 

2.

The messenger cuddles too close to Chiron
an immunosuppressive empath who won’t stop talking

I have been offered solicitude from an airplane
in advance of tomorrow—

’Tis true that the present feels quaint
such crudity and veneration of crisis: it’s so medieval

Midsummer arose to an adoring audience of barefoot teens
in California who never said it was time for anything, just whatever

Now’s olden cold treacle in bone china on the Eastern Seaboard,
brushing my teeth with German salt-paste as a bourgeois experiment

Fantasizing the life of a sculptor
what is this, the Marble Faun

Reading postcards from those cheap rent poet-monks of yore
floating on noodles in chlorine in deathless non-heaven

How many baptisms did they need
their trials by fire are finally smoke

Get me a switch! plurality is loves not love
try some (or several) and write me back!

 

3.

Not to be lofty, but I’m done with Ceres on my wall.
Galatea in ivory can stay but I seek other iterations,
GIANTS, for instance! nice ones!

A clay cave behind my bedroom lit from within by embers
was deserted in haste by conjurers the soft silt still holds their tread

        if I could hug that history I would, and quick

You can forge a spelling with nothing—heaving ballast in a stutter—
I’ve done it, and carried a tiny pebble under my tongue to slake thirst in
pretend emergencies, my reptilian afternoon hours supervised by stoners

if they weren't teaching us how to survive they were enticing us
to be reborn, a heavy trip for sure

        birds chirrup tra la / rise and shine it’s a new day

I watered a lemon tree in Central Park
an olive grove in grody Bushwick
people loved each other comfortably in public

(in fact, none of that
has happened yet)

        I am texting a Severe Alert in stone: good morn

I’ve put the stone in a bottle a sea salutation
thrown the bottle in the bathy water
full of baby whales

it’s no joke about the giants
they’re here on the ark

        and we wait for breakfast to drop from the sky

 

Contributor

Charity Coleman

Charity Coleman is the author of There, There (a forthcoming collection of prose and elegies) and Julyiary (O'clock Press, 2015). She is the editor of MONOWORLD, where poets go mono. She lives in Brooklyn.

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DEC 17-JAN 18

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