All that is Solid
Sun Falls
Goodnight Air
No Modernism
So Will You
An Interlude
News and Ontology
Horse in a Truck
Vibratory Nation Poem
Capitol/Capital
A Dandelion
Clouds Doing Nothing
Musical Notation
Grotesque
___
All that is Solid
Or, what I know about the body.
Fluid sits in the ear, waiting for sound. The nervous system holds memories of pain and pleasure for an entire lifetime. Any movement or touch or thought can trigger pain or pleasure that is, for the body, historical. Tightness in the palate or tongue causes corresponding tightness in the pelvic floor and cervix. The diaphragm flutters. The earliest movement is the movement of a starfish. Eyes dart upward. We see not at the eye but in the center of the skull. Lungs rise on a diagonal plane (one of the few diagonals in the body). Touch stimulates brain growth. Oxytocin fires in bursts. If touched, wounds heal faster. An aura of Mother-Mary-Blue shines above the head. Middle finger is connected to liver. Something beats in the back of the skull. Hormone, from the Greek “impetus,” or “onset,” or “rush.” The “onset of darkness” secreted by the brain, is affected not only by the time of day, but also by the season. Blue light suppresses sleep. All upon us.
Sun Falls
Woman in black rocks in time with the swaying chrysalis hidden in the branches of an elm
She makes proclamations about madness while someone photographs her
He buys a house on his phone
Goodnight Air
“A power, not a work … a struggle, not a thought” (Lorca – above the lake)
America’s diary, good night
A hobgoblin or an imp under the boy’s feet (the boy has a beard; he’s up on the desk; his hair bleached ashen; donut mouth)
.
“I believe that poetry has an hallucinogenic and holy magic”
No Modernism
Sleeping on a single bed in a house where addiction is a problem and runaways chant prepositions
Am I the state, shot through with paranormal kitsch? I said, addicted to what? The imagined benefit
of becoming lost forces one to travel to carpeted spaces with highways between
The bookshelves held
all of my friends. Small recognitions off screen. I could not sleep because I was afraid
In a museum with wings (folded down against wind) I placed my eye on two sailboats with brown sails
painted on a torn bit of cardboard
Then as a further act of devotion I drew my attention to a red horse, a girl on a couch, the loosened characters
departing the laundromat
in a protest against violence that was at the same time a turning away from the fully modern
So Will You
enter a lyrical stream—socialism returns to France—Wisconsin girls get pregnant at 19, 20, 21—big easy laughter—enter the lyrical stream—is someone crying upstairs?—no—the news suggests a shift from austerity—toward what lycanthropic dream?—the whistling of my son—a falling inward—terrarium on the rocking chair—how do the markets respond?—now I become a citizen among you— debaters sell soot—so will you—behind a revolving door—the bank is un-enterable—like bag in a bag—a plane in the sky—a body asleep in the arms of its mother—glass of vodka—tattooed to her arm—so will you—wander the house—in the early morning—light—
An Interlude
Give space (since life ends unawares)
To hale a coffined corpse adown the stairs;
For you will die (Thomas Hardy)
News and Ontology
rime hour
rhyme whore
somewhere afield something lies
Horse in a Truck
My favorite part was when they laughed and laughed
That was my favorite part too
And the horses
Yeah
Vibratory nation poem
Once I read what the climate change deniers had to say, I felt so happy for one day. Like the days before my mother got sick.
Capital/Capitol
Make a leaf
Make clouds
Make a layer of gas that blocks the sun
Make leaves and give one to everyone. Stir the ocean. Stir the ocean to bring up the deep cold. Enter a flower. Stay married. Only adopt. Adopt adopt. Use no wood (back to ideas). There are people then there are people. Stand in line and preorder. Preorder the hats. Hold out your wrists (they’ll beat you anyway). Hold out your wrists for you are to blame. The river gave birth to you. Now give birth to the river. Close your mouth. Close both your mouths. Dissolve in the origin. The clarion sun. Attach trees to the floor. Cut the strings. Play.
A Dandelion
Even if the candidate did not snip the locks off the blond boy’s head, he did sign on to the Ryan plan. I’m letting my plant die. It’s a project. I’ve put it on hunger strike. Keep your pants on; I was just shopping in my head. It takes a while to sit up and take it to the screen. But to really get the thing, I’ll need to first buy gas. ExxonMobil loves me and loves all my children. Especially when I flush the toilet, which I do about nine times a day. Or when I recycle the plastic container. What a joke. ExxonMobil and I love flowers. And we have earnings in the 9.5 billion per quarter. That’s down from last quarter. Here’s what Rex W. Tillerson has to say: I am a woman and I write in opposition to the subject/object split. I prefer to consider myself multiple. I am very excited to be drilling in the arctic. I love my red chair from which I rarely rise. I make the same as the president of the Ohio University system, and that’s just over 2 million a year. With a dandelion in my shirt pocket and my hands in my hair, I’m on the living list of living people where I reside.
Clouds Doing Nothing
After forty-nine bodies with heads and feet severed have been cleared off, children can once again frolic and couples can once again hold hands (but not men). And the girdle makes a comeback in Queens. “We still need to live while they do what they do.”
Musical Notation
Genentech will manufacture Crenezumab, designed to attack amyloid plaques
And if “irritability, sadness, crying, anxiety, and impulsivity” are Cardinal Features of the disease,
who’s to say I do not have it?
The sun has risen on Wednesday
The Ryan plan hopes to reduce government spending to .3 percent of GOP (except military)
All trees “leafed out”
My heart racing and they hope to build over the graves of slaves (not metaphorically)
In Florida a mother of four (33) shoots and kills them all
Grotesque
The body is its own conclusion
Thumb-sized bird in a leafless tree with yellow flowers
A pool with nobody in it
The ability to hear (the shot) is dimensionless
We cannot stop
hearing it
Julie Carr is the author of six books of poetry, most recently 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta, 2010), RAG (Omnidawn, 2014), and the forthcoming Think Tank (Solid Objects, 2015). She is also the author of Surface Tension: Ruptural Time and the Poetics of Desire in Late Victorian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2013), and the co-editor of Active Romanticism: The Radical Impulse in Nineteenth-Century and Contemporary Poetic Practice, forthcoming from University of Alabama Press (2015). Her co-translations of Apollinaire and contemporary French poet, Leslie Kaplan have been published in Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere and a chapbook of selections from Kaplan's Excess-The Factory has recently been released by Commune Editions. Carr was a 2011-12 NEA fellow and is an associate professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder where she teaches in the Creative Writing MFA program and the Intermedia Arts Writing and Performance Ph.D. program. She regularly collaborated with dance artist K.J. Holmes. She lives in Denver and helps to run Counterpath Press and Counterpath Gallery.