MiPOesias Magazine

Poet and collagist/object maker Laurie Price is the author of Except For Memory (Pantograph Press), Under the Sign of the House (Detour), The Assets (Situations) and Minim (Faux Press). Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Arshile, New American Writing, HOW2 (poetry & mixed media sections), the east village (poetry & art) readme, Xcp, ixnay, and Skanky Possum, et al. New work is forthcoming in The No Tell Motel Bedside Companion, Second Floor. She has lived in various towns and cities across the US, Mexico, and Morocco, and currently lives in Granada, Spain.

DISTANCES

You trust at the corners, the truth a viable joke, its tremolo a minor chord. Your gaze is correct, you have the funky rhythm. You circumnavigate the airwaves, wing on high, tone in shaft. You strike the position, your virtue towers along the cobblestone walkway while you talk a violet streak, disperse a multitude of vitamins.

The light grills you. You have only questions. Prestidigitation. Your blue presence fuses into afternoon above the mountains. The light is yours, the orange and delirium. False cognates speak their own kind of music tangled between understandings. The difference between live and leave is greater than a shortened vowel.

I admit to moments without applying their gentle distress. A fly’s wing. A hammer.

Having decided several things this morning I scribe them here:
The operation: an excess
The Cat bifurcates. It’s not much but it’s something.
This cold is irrational.
It’s an occupation that affords me no small measure of unenjoyment.
Hard to begin, harder to continue.
I continue.

Utopian pile of thought an end in itself. Endpoints of spontaneity and emptiness, happy for nothing.

Twelve visible squares of darkening blue contrast with the ambience of radiated heat, hot beverage and orange cushions this side of them.

Presence of light-bearing abundances be they rectangular articulations or squared is in any case suffice it to say self and other, that yellow piece of fuck.

The cold is foreign, unwelcome invader but illegally resident. Soy extranjera. Vengo de extranja. And the tolerable damage, so be it, however sustaining the truth of excess.
Separation grows in life, or growth lives in separations, duplicities accelerate (cell division), augment. What’s meant by “Conferring denies nothing, nor an abrogation.”?

Ignorance mistakes misplaced gestures or Ignorance. Mistakes. Misplaced. (Gesture).

One mimes, carriaged in enchantment. Why do these words forget the accents of a kiss? Contemplate you, your nerves, the endings. He or she, the same. Forget nothing. There I was.

I didn’t forget to have or have not. I bluntly refused it she says over coffee. Truth was one could live, remain a confused uncertainty pulled at by hope, optical illusions, sedimentary arrangements at the bottom of a cup.

The feeling in exile beyond love is ecstatic. Speech the love of the insane. You dream it. A comfort event. It falls from being. Its fall a sort of failure.

For its part, beyond the fact-free, some three of facets. From their something to unconsidered attachments, appearances and disappearances, breathing a kiss in warm yellow engagement. This. Exhaling its human scorch, that yellow piece of fuck.

Sometimes to reject speech is to love well words.
The operation: an excess.
The Cat bifurcates. It’s not much but it’s something.
This cold is irrational.

Resists evasions, constricted maps. Her treasured darkness shaken from his lips. He wouldn’t say a word that wouldn’t write. I spoke. I will. I trajectorize in circular formations, plow deeper in.

Night sitting in her quiet sentence among crushed blue icicles. She hummed the rests. Inertia held them in temporary resist. Or they embraced pushing all their weight towards its edge. I spoke to each other. I rolled with the mistranslations what was dangerous.
Oscillated risks and yellow fleck of kiss.

It’s hard enough to begin, that much harder to continue.
We continue.

I only unhinge her, there’s no display. You’re called phrase, body, and. The cold is foreign,
unwelcome invader, illegally resident. We weave between lengthening distances,
appearing and disappearing.
Touch in all that rages. Threadbare trusts.

BENEDICTION

Letters flutter above a page in quiet meditation in Mediterranean drifts. Upward or downward sweep of circling air rearranges the letters until they form sounds. If words play with each [thought, if thought depends on breath] breath. If I dream with random precision. If verbs recycle like thought, not like thought, which, having no center, ebbs, drifts. If thought changes. [Recycles as breath, exactly as breath]
Words swim. Liquid as thought, stropped. Dense.

Carve land. Carry water. Air surrounds. [If life is mythical fire soon appears signaling that things are about to heat up. Okay, so] Later fire appears, flames fed by air as words paint each breath. Watch the striations of color and custom habit their tepid struggles warming to thought
blossoms.

Watch the temperature rise observe how it heats the flowering molecules. Expansion exacts dispersals. Again, thought blossoms. Motion in all moments extol the moment.
Observed pollen bursts. [Mind the heat]

There is no story that is not true. The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others. There are strangers everywhere. Strangers who stray from their clan on their way to where things are or aren’t the same.

A full week of processions, horns, percussion – now a rag-tag orchestra – [listen to the trombone’s notes slide from its cavity] dominates a cobblestoned domain lit by perseverance. The penitents follow. Mournful mouthful. Narration as blessing.

Week of saints. If with the passing of days penitents and bystanders drink the streets swallow or not an extraordinary quantity of body and other fluids. Weak of saints, the distance from church pew to trough, street.

The penitents follow. Some wear cone-head masks above satin robes to hide their identity. Others, less shameful, merely drink to forget their identity. Optical illusions, guarded confessions. Remorse. Incognito.

Jesus sexy on his cross, legs spread, arms open, worldly embrace? Penitence follows penis envy in the dictionary.

God’s rays project through the lowering cloud mass alighting on rooftops and allegories, parabólicas and cables, tops of newly flowering trees. Lines thusly joined refute penetration. A geometry of incognizant shapes rent, meridian points intersect.
What’s human? The answer is the question.

As scraggly orchestra members limp off towards the edges of the city clouds part, seduced by temptation. Sun pricks through and men in lime-green plastic suits armed with enormous plastic bags, carrying big mops, scatter from the main avenues into all the sidestreets, alleyways, and plazas of Granada to begin their work. Messages code and uncode. Pass from one to an other. All we know just as we know it. Think we know it. Thought blossoms! Erase from these streets! Amen.