reflection on Rocket Celestial, John-Michael Bloomquist, White Stag Publishing 2023

Rocket Celestial
John-Michael Bloomquist
White Stag Publishing, 2023

I don’t know where I’m healed because I don’t know where I’m sick. Dear body, John-Michael Bloomquist’s Rocket Celestial is an escorted vision that sees itself then sees itself out. Is an eyelash stitched into a chameleon’s scar. At its crucified center are folk songs about robotic nostalgias, scriptures of the between life, skulls filled with hair rattling around in space helmets larger than toothaches, and animals with memories invented by progress. In its gifted heaviness are transmissions that spiral and become some southern phantom dreaming of a tree that remembers the last unprogrammed tree. If its verse puts body horror on the moon, the moon being a way of saying the world we came with had a destroyed past and a way of saying I inherit the balance of my absence, then its song keeps its images isolated to those saintly encoders whose hauntings embed creation in the most freely fearful. This is an earth story, an exact art of lonely math, an inward outing of inquiry, blood, and peace. Lesson is a sound. Let it ring, untraveled, here. I don’t know where we begin and we begin.

~

reflection by Barton Smock