Archive for April, 2015
Anna Atkins, Polypodium crenatum, Norway, 1854, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Scotiabank CONTACT Photography FestivalPast Picture: Photography and the Chemistry of Intention.
4. What they will say is yours
Is your body, are your hours, are your efforts, your own? Or does the narrow world say that the only thing left for you is your pain? It is easy to feel like your time belongs to your employers and your body to men or the family or the state but that your pain is yours entirely, that your struggle is a field you cultivate yourself, a thorny one of your-own-damn-fault. This is their other weapon: to make the opposite of what is true seem true. But what is actually true is that in the world as it is now pain is the one thing we can be certain we are never in alone.
5. Another kind of poem
The narrow world would have women and other people make people and care for them just to donate them as brutal, sensate, pained material of the world in this arrangement. It would ask us to gestate food for its nightmare. It would ask us to reproduce, with our love, fodder with a pain scale, then surplus, fodder, too, and only what can feel the pain exacted upon it. But when we feed & grow & tend each other it is not to feed & grow & tend the machinery of expansionist death. There are reasonable things we can do to refuse this. That is another kind of poem.
Baltimore is the darkest place
it’s basically been fucked with
damp houses
meat in the trees
And you are the world’s most
intrepid salesman
Energy
that’s what you have
instead of Harvard.
You make me feel
like a kitten
with a wallet
with a wallet
But the sun is strange
pencil light pouring
out of a hole and
I can’t move in this house
someone’s life
is still here
the bed is warm
with it.
Why do I go on the internet
when everywhere else
is heaven?
Even the torture
of watching my hand
in the bathwater
Even the flat silver
light of Baltimore.
I came here
I thought it was free
I wanted to write poetry
God was in a car in the sky
and I shouted my arm is so weak
and he said I know
it’s like a toothpick holding a machine
and I saw his face for a minute
Satan’s bacony lips
It wasn’t God
just some confident animal
in a car
And the trees were
kind of purring
And I noticed my legs
were gone.
We’re like something
that camps out
in your home
here is the chair
here is the door
opening
the glare of light
on your tongue
heaven touches me
again
the text
is its own animal
panting
in the dark.
an experiment in permaculture poetics
Ten :: collaborative curation :: stone/scale/shift
in search of stones, in search of other portals,
salt from scale, from the muddy bottom.
En el cuerpo que cambia se revela
un monumento fuerte, sólido, consistente, pétreo.
a girl curled stone-like on her side
remembering who we are to each other.
It sounds like paper made of stone
a fluid bone, an organ composed of mouth
~~~~~
Spiral Orb is an experiment in juxtaposition, interrelationships, and intertextuality—a cross-pollination. This opening poem composts fragments from each of the pieces in Spiral Orb Ten. Standing also as the table of contents, each line is embedded with a hyperlink to its original piece. Once at each piece, you will find links to the other pieces in Spiral Orb Ten .
Spiral Orb Ten is a special issue, Collaborative Curation: Stone/Scale/Shift.
For past issues of Spiral Orb: archives
word pond 