learning how to breathe: a sequence poem

this is a sequence poem about the interplay between nature and industry. i consider this a completed work, no critiques necessary:) the formatting might have changed a bit when i copied and pasted

origins

metals scathe then render bone
into wired light.

this is how we make contact
when we can’t see and don’t touch.

a cave was dormant
inside itself.

we interpreted shadows
but not their debris.

when light couldn’t escape,
it unfurled, was chilled.

the miner found copper
at an angle.

at the right angle,
the plane is neutral.

his copper was old feathers
glinted by light we made.

even when nimble, time dulls in
imprinting faces on pennies.

the plan was loose change skidding,
then it was shoveled away.

distance

smoke lilted from her lipstick
in the chamber and you wanted
to touch her. the one who
doesn’t matter anymore. the
one i never was.

the artificial lusted
with silver lips
and rusty nails
to prod the body
of a tributary.

i wanted your plastic wrapping,
artificial, goose bump lips first.
i want to refigure rivers with you.
it makes me want and wait
either way.

the wallpaper made us thirsty,
going on like the stream
the piston subtracted from the crescent.

we drank the water
all the while
concrete shoveled us into ghosts.

there was evidence

in the darkroom diorama
of a carcassed civilization
the paper melted in water:

we were on our way to the light
reflected lens specks
through cobbles.

i saw figures in the corner
replacing silence with hammers.

since there is no crisis
they make blueprint plans
to scale our ground,
earth or lungs.

before here

the city looked like winter

charcoal slabs nudged the sky
to move farther away

and we never walked away
from this

even when the sky
was a skeleton
whose bones we couldn’t discern
and the same dust or chalk
specked everything

we coffined ourselves blindly
between nearsighted buildings
where smoke seethed
and cement sealed the sight
of the soil

die, wind

the city wants the soothing to disappear
to shoebox-suffocate and say die, wind
while we think we could be dead for so many reasons

the appetite swells riper and more proud
than one hundred orchards or one hundred acres
consuming the ground with the asphalt mouth

our bones will be leftover
the city will speak in fogged-light tongue
the foghorn will ghoul silence us

still we resurrect saffron, harvest incarnate
and i trust your conversation of lung and ribcage

natural history

time creaks open the alcoves
we patiently find in our palms.
we pick apart the teeth of the corn
learning their fibers and ours.

the chalkboard reality
opens the city
into the dissected parts
of a swallow.
the past was captured and gone
but we imprint its emboss
on the cellar walls.
how tortured everything was
when we started to lose direction
before we learned
the valleys in our own hands.

remember how we left behind the institutions
where we weren’t welcome?
how together, our metals hearts turned fertile
and we learned to sooth each other calm,
cooling exhales of quiet winters.

cycle

our secrets hide in tilling
the immaculate bones of soil

frost overturns the green
aches our stomachs cold

when spring limps past winter

we cling to this earth
like soil to our fingernails

recover bloodless arteries
hollow roots

open pedals holding seeds
that wisp away
and grow again
in the same place

nest

there was nothing on the plywood mask
but a palimpsest whispering not wanting to breathe here
the chimney smoke separating the circuits in the sky
that pigeons step on, feeling every saw-tooth nail.

i was the impossible figure of disconnects
heart subway small, crammed like gravel 
in a basement jewelry box
wanting only transit, suffocating calm.

we attached missing parts of earth’s body disembodied
with first home toy-box abandons what i need for the paper airplane
then flew it through the seams, what i need to “find a place”
as if we were saying it’s familiar here
making up for holes in the blanket" 
a memory or memory. 
on the other side we held the ability to differ 
from the extreme of what could go wrong 
and won’t 
and the destruction that actually happens.

we learned to dismantle
interconnections involving force
and momentum, the pendulum getting closer and closer
to landfall, and make it so the telephone wires
were perfect from our perspective.

maturation

outside knowledge is waxed over
in the infancy of prelude,
we are hidden by a silver spooned candle.

where there is a scrawl on the old tree,
we count the rings, a new/ old belief

***

a child
wakes up from memory
and imagination compensates
for black holes

i didn’t turn away what
was missing until
i knew i could unravel you:

i caught a nettle by its point

i have your heat and your will

***

the whole of a pasture
reproduces a piece of the ground
into all of itself

our bare backs orchestrate
you see the straw
in my backbone
threadless frayed
bare bone
threadbare
the vulnerable healed
by lit cicatrice

***

i’ve dug my fears with your spoon
hollow with nineteen years.
i can map my own hull
where parts disconnect
and it doesn’t scare or surprise me.

i captured a lover, myself, and love
be the statue of a woman’s body
i’m a woman and the dreams are underneath.
i could have let my body refuge in the sand
reciting the infinite s in a seashell.

a dolphin recovers a sad
filtered body trotting
to the surface. you could be the one
who wants alone
and turning seaward

instead

we feel and have become
resonation under earth
turning lava to stone

courses

still in sticky spring,
the waxed summer forest 
restores itself, leaves wet the ashes
thirsty or too full

i will say, feeling light in skull
overcoming nausea in the sky
sticky eaves from turning vine 
or invasive
here is the place i was young, once
after the fire of an orchard field
and springing the ones that will take milk 
and years.

the body undoes herself 
gown to chest, 
soft top to soft bottom
with the impregnable fear 
of never jolting the hips
teach me or wait for me or both.

i will be thinking of it"
i can’t count years 
or see myself anyway
but i’m still cupped in a drink, still taken
or predating. and his this,
still heated,

still the body
of a mosquito net 
trapping heat or chills 
of a fever or good feeling 
(love and don’t fear it, or me)
and no one is indifferent.

discards

we can bury the stale dough
under red wine pine oak
it was comfort we long ago
extracted
from our wheats:
sanguine and willed
kneading through a tension
in the blade.

if i never ate bread again,
i already gave up that
half of myself to yours,
still half of my own whole grain.

what was pressing
is now a dust mark
of old blueprints.
we can haul pride around our shoulders
and never throw our spines out.
we’re ridding the chip, the plaster
silver-lacquered chip of a nail,
the forgettable body part
or piece of a building.

Reviews

[Antonio Valentino]

Wow...

pretty amazing.

Terrific piece, glad I got to read it!
Antonio