Issue #116 Three Poems

Three Poems

Nora Treatbaby

Issue #116
March 2021

The Cranking Music of “Who Am I”

if every word from my tongue

be changed to flowerage

as living language I could speak secrecy

it is as a set of questions

enacts what it says violet time

dispersed verbs no measurement could hold

when is beatific feeling how to make it occur

indeterminacy in each turn language

could not fill w meaning

filled w meaning but spilling over

pooling on the floor where I eat


I cannot
hold onto a word that answers, let’s say,
a question, which deems response, not as
in fact but a duality that we exceed so garnering
language to dispel it. I wish

the human being would take on
some of this chore, like, how does one accomplish
the conceptual task? Adjectival scatter back
world from which they came transposed pronouns
male to synonym of et cetera in apparent
shift of shape of universe

worked out the nervous tic of over
explaining myself, self-appointed enemy
of explanation

cannot trust what is made
or comes from a making process
knowledge therefore banished

a dream believed weird to touch
don’t forget
truth is a window
only ever partial

and when we came to a spatial space
it was lines and hues set against
words and their policies
one could act an anchor to the world like ‘weird’
and another just a diversion, like ‘woman’.

a word
is unlivable
just go out
and scream
the crisis
in each
sound
be gay

Errorlove

A flaw. Could there be conceived a more superior opening? An injury to the outwardness of things / a leak in time’s little shell. We are witness not so much to ourselves as to each other, and so it is that we appear in the emotional history of perception. So flush with strata. Awash in taxa. Species defined at the end of its variation. The induvial is but a small remainder. We are given the clean slate of a perfect silhouette. Reality being primordial, we undergo it. Thrown universe, slightly adrift of the outline. Spilt from a thong. An ear turned inwards to the gravitational law of thine own genitals. What disturbs the placid waters of the celestial dish? Politics and the gist of it. Ideas abound and I am divided. The sky is like a melted swatch expanding like the universe towards imperceptible constructions. Perfect for conversation. I recounted my day at work and sort of just whimpered a dying rose into my ice water. We sketched a cosmogony of depth. Found none. Is time a delay? We devise each other in exchanges of that nature although at this conjuncture all the world’s a contract. The self is its continually deferred penalty. Metaphysics builds a house but not a home. Nonetheless you’ve fashioned the boards and planks of my ass into a bed for your hand. How does one move as if foliage? Quivering in rebellion against those that reason duplicating beauty could be anything but a distrust in what is near to the source of what is. This photography of the wind zips us into skin from the organized ocean. My eyes are sewn into this version of seeing. Each to each, till we are all just eaching. For want of perfect explanation, and so it is we are dominated. Identity rents us to each other. And yet for flaw, there is nowhere to appear. The world is complete and unlimited. Unlimited renewal, complete opening. One penis snapping in the wind flagging naught.

Little Ditty

love is the porch
upon which I sit
and ponder the
tree its antinoise
which does not
occur

beauty is supposedly
as a drop of dew
a collection of
repeated elements
dissipating into the dome

whence does the rivulet
enjoy the source
of the arching cypress?
who knew ‘twould
fuck so?

Earth is dropping hints
like “I’m real”
and “love me”

Category
Language & Linguistics, Gender, Sexuality & Eroticism
Subject
Poetry, Love
Return to Issue #116

Nora Treatbaby is the author of the chapbooks Ammo In Hairdo (Impunity Press) and Hope Is Weird (Other Weapons). Her work is published in Nat. Brut, Apricity, Sublevel Magazine, and Nightboat, and others. She does not spend her time.

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