sleep and death
bathing
in a me-shaped
emptiness
were never seen
by the same
ghost
when an animal
reading
dies
Mother an ache through which has rolled a hula hoop
Father a broken tv
missed by lightning
Eye a longing, a spoonful of milk
On a blue
arm
a mosquito
born in god’s
erasable
kiss.
A clown
so early
to the unmoving
dog.
Most movies
are hidden
by sleep.
newborns
playing tag
in a dream
Requisite
Tanya Holtland
Platypus Press, 2020
–
Does silence ever notice the quiet? Can doom move the past? Are we, by listening, able to pose our ask into a speaking that might enter unheard the conversation so lovingly and urgently remembered in Tanya Holtland’s Requisite? What language, what ghostly origin, what presence. With unassigned awareness, and while swallowing the clinical eye of attention, Holtland knows to talk underwater about distance and to use both our archival futures and communal isolations to render a spiritual economy of verse enough for us to picture multiple ecologies from the vantage point of some same animal with the ability to wonder secretly which four shapes will be on the test. And what of those stills of misplaced exits that were slipped into the water-damaged photo album of an escape artist, and what of our walking, and what of our inaction? Whether one scores…
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it was nothing more
the present
than one of now’s
better dreams
In Ohio when they bring up the ocean:
the moon
sends to earth
a ghost
kingsoftrain 