Tag: jj

[ w/ bright green large format dot grid & black ink ]

some things that resemble pain are unrelated
to pain, or related to pain only by blood. sooner

or later blood leaves you. her body made the
monster and the monster made the rules.

[ w/ bright green large format dot grid & black ink ]

some of us are addicted to turning
whose gentle medicine works even
against a curve. this is a wet body
with a lump in it. there is no such
thing as the perfect mutation. let me
code you a plain. let me plateau you
a fingerprint. ok so our fingertips
distribute what’s been given us
amplified by what sharpens us. ok so
i’m back to uncounting my circles

ok so it’s easy to bleed the pen against the animal

it slows
it tries to tell you
it tires of
telling you

i’m back
to seething in circles
i’m wagging
anyone’s tongue who’s available
seering thank you
into a steak
complexing a sauce
in a series of bowls

it’s easy to bleed

some of what
slices
does so in secret
some blades
automatically drawn
if i drew you a picture
of what happened
it would take
very little time

if i draw you a picture of what’s happening
the center of the page cut out

the center
unbusy
default scraped out

the demon’s just
a little picture
i drew

the dream’s just
a little thought i had
no worries

[ w/ bright green large format dot grid & black ink ]

some molecules leave a syrup behind, it pools
reluctant to gel anywhere in particular. some turns
of phrase turn green when you’re not watching.
some haunting isn’t haunting, it’s host-engineered.
what’s one more bump if we call it something
broader. what’s one more yelp mutating back too
close to its original. what’s that one familiar digit
in an unfamiliar number. some technology removes
its own buttons, but slowly: no one plays fabric
the way that you play fabric. no one stops the move
before the end of the move the way that you stop.
no one wants to keep knowing their own circles
having been handed squares but color reveals and
revolves, color sneaks out of you, color gives you
away, color sends you back. you’re dull and color
knows it. you’re down where color is up. smear
your face, it doesn’t make a difference: some
molecules were there the whole time.

[ w/ bright green large format dot grid & black ink ]

look

you are wearing the fold
grains in your pockets
the paper bag of the
rippling future

next

a flicker of light
forces distinction
some leave risk
shakily intact

to fold in on oneself
was once described as
fluorescence

to fold into the other
was looming

//

one loon
screams across the lake

brilliance
was never actually reserved
parties of four or more, please

tact shakes you
risk sweats you
distinction
also known as info

prior

greening echo
unpacks itself
into everything
preparing to green

look

[ w/ bright green large format dot grid & black ink ]

enter select desire

in column, pivot,

exit column intact

it’s scientifically casual

it plants its crops

into longer & longer

biologies

it tries to measure this

stretch of road

for its innate stretchiness

//

when desire makes a promise

the column

swells with pride,

the children do indeed

resemble

(simply set down

your crops,

cup your hands,

to complete this puzzle)

[ w/ bright green large format dot grid & black ink ]

no one comes here just to sit
no one reads in the back of the closet
without a light
no one gets their full bodies
through the trap door
no pleather resembles skin, one
hardens with age, one
thins its own ideas over time

busy street, too busy to know
yours was halfbody, less maybe
you’d put your hands against the
fishbowl and scream and
no one would hear you so you
skip it
skip back
leave the sound of you wailing
in the future

//

in the future
the whales are coming to
sound it back
sound it out
anyone can behold a parting water but
how thick the wall of the beast
hands free in the open ocean is the
deep secret in my shallow ended
animal era, flippering the bird

but the sky thins in a blink
but it does this for
any assurance or any shred
of access to light
any body can make a splash
in the dark
any page could be the one
any one but you

[ w/ bright green large format dot grid & black ink ]

no memory of the dream but the dream remembers to squeeze your airway enough to wake you. no memory of giving the necklace back but some things not built to rot do. memory of strange permissions. memory draped in excess fabric. memory caked in dirt. memory of your body being thrown from the animal but the animal will do no harm. no memory of how many times the silver edge. no memory of how many sandy hairs on how many sandy heads, some more sandy than others. memory of the architecture of the scene but not the scene itself. memory of some of the many ways to put your hand on a jawbone. fog memory of how to make certain that jawbone moves. we don’t breathe into our mouths but we’re made to feel that way. we nod to systems as the systems undo us. we misread our fire bellies as fire in the throat. we swallow our flames, go ka-blooey. i once beheld the vast network of forest service roads from a dangerous vehicle. i excused myself into my shoulder injury, in whose socket i became one week sober. sobriety throbbed there. my heart raced in half-sleep. i woke exhausted and clear. i locate the animal but the animal will do no harm.

//

harm animal lives in the caves on the edge of your vision, miles past waking. for the two-day trip you pack four days of food and seven days of water. this is seeking’s math. this is a hunger for losing your way. there is no hunt on the itinerary. there is no weapon. your voices carry deep into the first evening, having left at dusk, and your blood comes early the next morning. every living thing must think you injured. you don’t even know where you make the blood go but it goes, goes far enough to scrounge another night so to ease your backs you eat every remaining bite, a ridiculous feast, you don’t even leave breakfast and you don’t wake hungry. there is nothing you’ve tied into the trees, there is no hole to bury your blood. only the deer came in the night, whose proof graze glass-eyed near the nylon of you, unbothered by zippers. before you hike down you hike up: pack you out, pull up your socks, dust off your elbows, spread your arms wide. the sun is coming up in tune with waking. the sun is coming down, both hammer and bell, to ring you red and nail you down dusty. you never meet the animal and you’ve secreted a weapon but no one is seeking damage.

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draw a circle in the sand from the lime bucket where it’s easy
to recruit language when it may save your life between each
flurry of impacts in sand redrawing but muscle memory stays
your hand’s guardian shape with every circle’s keyhole where
every keyhole translates the door it’s in & the door it is & don’t
hurt me i love you don’t come any closer & each time we beat
the ground it comes in fours with each tight turn that could be
tighter in the shape metal leaves against your chest because
each boundary is meticulously watched and we can’t flush all this
dust out of our eyes

//

this is the shape of your hand doing its labor before its work
this is everything ground down to its purpose

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heaven help

the day after
love

//

if you believe that heaven bends

the skin’s elasticity, if you believe
who holds moments over who

holds moments over, if the salve
can also crack, if heaven presents us

our moments and not the other way

around

there is a difference between not
believing in heaven

and disbelief

there is a point in the future when
even ground has gone but

the geography
isn’t done with you

[ w/ bright green large format dot grid & black ink ]

the poem (this is not a poem) might reserve the motel room, where sleep
is just a detail, sleep is for sleep’s self. it’s almost an oxymoron, you know,
to be consoled. time hypes you up into the high reaches of your whatever
where you believe in self as singularity, self as genes plus proximity, self
meticulously packed pre-bloom in the imagination. does the physical spark
the ethereal? does the u-haul bruise bloom better? even bruises have a soul.
even the soul and its superglue. how delayed is your reaction? how written
are your hands? hey, i’m defining the soul here, standing in this driveway,
filling out another report, watch out.

//

watch me, filling in another room
at the top of another driveway. cross my heart and hope to never ship all
these books another grumble grumble miles. the tidy woman’s walls each
one another shade of navy never called navy, rows of temperature-controlled
gridwork and hey some really neat acres but just once wildness, please, thank
gawd the treehouse sways, little corner of rotting forest floor under, greater
canopy of cover on the verge of calling it over, there’s some agreement there
to hold, there’s some reason the dog multiplies crocodiles by the bedroom
door, there’s always trying to keep your company in the small of my pocket

[ w/ bright green large format dot grid & black ink two ways ]

a ritual that involves tying can turn so secret it never really tells you
if it turns out to be no ritual at all. maybe the whole of your mouth on a rainy day corpse
is what the ritual turns on, how it turns in on you, turns dripping, molding somewhere
against you, a spell who drags you further into the basement. did those photos of you
lash you to others? did you go into the burn jar, too? when you invest
and others move away, you drag. you scrape your affection into any calling object.
you church so others can stay home. you are righteous and objects do not affect you.
who put these bounds here?
how do we fade into them?
what is our timeline?
what is timing us?
is the train late?
or too early?
helllllllo??

//

pause.
quiet you.
and/or pulse.
open window.
too many buttons.
too many edges on this.
too many tags to tear out.
i hold each object in my hand before placing it on the shelf as though anything or
everything can or will speak to me. i haven’t been feeling so well ha ha ha ha ha.
with the tip of my finger i brush specks of dry skin out of my eyelashes
and right into my eyes. reduce me, reuse me. roll me in the barrel down the stairs,
haven’t you heard the basement’s finished? oh oh haven’t you wanted to be haunted
in a fresh coat of paint? walls so fresh you can eat off ’em. walls so bright it’s alright you
don’t know much. the dark is still the dark as soon as you’re in it

[ w/ bright green large format dot grid & black ink ]

let’s talk hand-of-gawd.

girlhood, having already fallen under the heavy hand
of the editor, is about to be made unofficial. but where
do the scraps of girls go? where to deposit what we cut
away? throw us in the gene bucket, we’re going for a
swim. pierce the egg with the needle, extract every bit
of labor. whose cells do the work of life and whose work
is editing not living and who fills in the gashes left open,
mostly intentional, inviting the crisp air.

what if the tool’s errand is specifically to cut? what if the
tool doesn’t stick around? what if the tool raises you,
presses bite after bite into your mouth as though it can’t
slice you. it slices you. this is not a spell.

//

make it a spell or die trying: it slices, it dices,
it pries open your mouth when you can’t finish your dinner,
it raises your yelling arms until you bite your own tongue,
it fools you into thinking you can carve your own likeness out

of your own likeness: you know, that ol’ trick
of removing your own material until you are both something
and nothing, both life and the living of it, both cell and its
cleaving, all of it straight line of the needle and the curve
of its eye and what enters the eye, curving, and what enters
each hole in the fabric and what enters multiples, what enters
pleases repetitive fingers, what enters is also all of it, is straight
line, is curved line, eyes squeezing into spaces they’ve never been.

this stitch goes right in the flesh.

[ w/ bright green large format dot grid & black ink ]

when you set out to split

a lime

you create the suggestion that all limes

will split

//

a split will

never ever ever ever ever not even once

gets it right

on any of the early tries

[ w/ bright green large format dot grid & black ink ]

call me your satellite. show me your
core. the whole fails for the sake of the
parts. the parts they are afraid to speak
incorrectly and so they are afraid speech
is what ails them and so they are afraid
speech is what ails you too and so
we all of us are diagnosed with speech —
we become stupid in public spaces, we
become liquid in academic spaces, we
become inauthentic with fear (fear rides us
well), we become deboldened with fear (fear
frails us well)

behold, failure: fear’s shining jewel
set so high it scrapes. i came to be my own
imaginary woman by feeling sorry for myself
for being a woman while asking myself am i
a woman and then it is not 2014 it is 2019
and i am not a woman and i want the throw
the i into the trash already, want to be
pulling miles out of boxes, want to be
on the edges of a great crowd feeling
its pulse but not its heat

//

the fire in this moon goes
blue when it doesn’t feel well, un-
wellness having been predicted by
some original water from a crackling
dance floor where the blues band is more
stale than the oyster crackers but 2024
must have other secrets to queue up or else
just imagine waking up five years after and
actually you’re just a wheel down to the
scraps of your own tread, ready to fail

deadbolted with failure
(thin metal still holds), inactive with failure (yeah
i’m talking about that one dot), failing liquid and
solid & dreaming of space, whether
liquid or solid shrinking back, whether
solid or sinking in the checkered kitchen —
not ailment, not ointment, nothing
of consequence on the x-ray, no one on the
other end of any wire, not a bird perched but
the weekend’s fat robins were in the dirty
snow, the small boots filled with joy’s
messy water, the lake lit wide

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to lead is not to pull toward you. we demonstrate direction

by moving too. former names pull from the easternmost point.

the easternmost point of sadness. the easternmost point of

grief. the non-vocal line. the easternmost line. failure

cans itself, then makes the blade that rips itself

open. yes, we tell this joke often.

//

acid tomato goes bubble

on the family stove, not quite giggle, not exactly

burble. the pot also swells only from the inside, belly

soft against the stiff-all that holds it. if you hear talking then

you also hear shaking. if you shake you’re onto something real

cracking a question. i didn’t say follow me i said hello.

[ w/ bright green large format dot grid & black ink ]

in june of the same year we waded into pushaw lake in our clothes. some memories
pull cut fruit from the cooler. anticipating loss was a strand tied at the wrist, one strand
for each day of distance. tying was about naming colors, and then it was about
sending the present somehow forward & backward at the same time, and then about
anticipating the ritual of removal without understanding what would be removed.

we did not plan what happened next.

some memories are made of what we wished we were doing. heaven help the strand
to change the rules. over time, the strands would begin to weave together because days
become weeks, because we didn’t account for how distance multiplies. i said
let’s always begin with what we can put our hands on
there on the same page where i instructed myself to wait. i forbade myself to enter
the houses of others. i was not the object in question.

//

here’s an object to house the questions temporarily:
have you forbidden yourself instruction? have you ever seen true devotion?
can we let’s always begin?
where on the page, if anywhere, would you wait? how does distance multiply?
what are the rules? what strands are created by the rules? what weaves that also
discloses? who accounts for what’s heavenly? what remembers us?

what will have happened after?

[ w/ well worn large format spiral bound graph & messy black ballpoint ]

and what animal. and what a burning
wait. soon climb to roof’s high point
to set a low point. who am versus what
am. everyone brings a weapon to the
hair salon.

burned the next envelope alone
on the fire escape having been told
to step back and watch the fingers
that strike the match but how one
gets far enough from one’s own
hands to see everything instead of
feel everything. but i’ve had fingers
for centuries, and fire is so often
just a thing on a hill.

//

the plow we didn’t
hire comes to take the slush and
spins faux stuck or real stuck until
the lie resolves itself. is that ghost
or is it line, that flicker? our trees
seem to hold so our fingers go
along with it but all the managers
have a headache and all the
procedures start with a letter,
ruining language as we know it.

sandpaper bathtub
has just enough grit for outflux. this is
dream scenario lite. all this fluff is eaten
by all this slush. sliced my thumb in a
vision, it was enough to get the job done.

[ w/ matte black medium format grid & various inks / various shards ]

3am, signs of life: sunflower seed hull, shoelace. crack of fire, pop of mechanisms.

excessive survey of potential need. call the number on the side of the building,

it rings forever. i am the woman who works everywhere / walks everywhere. walked

to the bar i mean walked to the bus, boarded the bus, etc. if my mother left

right now maybe i could have a mother i would try very hard. floating around just

letting things happen. shitty acoustic, empty seats. hand me a temporary tattoo.

give me a dollar for the jukebox. just me & a beer & my greyhound knees.

at some point today it becomes spring, at another the sun and the moon get

in each other’s way. it’s so easy to cry on the greyhound.

//

cubicles were made for crying. each way you go about it

the sound is eaten by the walls but no one knows what the walls do with it.

what about everything i wrote down for later. just me & a reliable bruise.

what to expect when you’re expecting to be sober. seltzer. candor. calisthenics.

what about everything i wrote down for later. oh gawd what about everything i

wrote down i mean i make so many lists you would roll, etc. what about everything.

what about too few miles on the bike path / too many miles of nerve fibers. what

can i say, the skin’s elasticity has a limit and there i thought i was ready to stretch,

3am is never not on my mind even if we’re barely acquainted, baffled.

[ w/ bright green large format dot grid & blue ink ]

i stamp my fingers onto the glass over and over: a circular
series of lines layered upon the same identifying marks
sweating on themselves sweating each other. how often
do you study your own lines: how much time do you take
to do this: do you apply your lines to yourself and with
what frequency: do you take yourself line by line:

have you taken yourself apart
line by line

//

get in line
to undo yourself again:

who else do you undo in the process: what process
lines the places your skin curls back: what makes you
think it could ever be the same: are you staying inside
the lines: trace your finger over maps to make a vehicle
of you while it’s still unclear you’ll be a vessel, whose
distinction goes: that name i was afraid to offer myself

[ w/ hot pink large format dot grid ]

taking risks after nonsense. last day in, first day in. sunslant, copper sun block, sticky circles. broke ten days
to be here. broke four months to be there. the bar is loud and i love that. sun in my eyes, sun on my page.
i’ve been thinking about it a lot more since paul died. i talk to paul about it a lot since he died. i wonder
about it a lot since paul died. paul died and then probably i had a drink. paul died, but not of drinking.
paul and i never talked about drinking in life.

paul’s blood in my cup.

somewhere, i’m pouring.

//

have kept pouring me out.

have remained a secret fan of naming.

having never talked about drinking in death.
will die, but not of drinking. will probably breathe out a fountain arc. oh paul, is there drinking in the
afterlife? how to speak to the dead having never believed in heaven. how to behold the dead after they
have died having never known them in life. moon eyes, moon sentences. nothing’s ever quiet when your
ears ring. broke ten days. broke four months. broke etcetera. the moon never really goes down, that’s nonsense.