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…
View original post 42 more words
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
touch
kills the future
but uses
at least
the whole
animal
all nostalgia
is impostor
nostalgia
find a snake
made of sleep
and addicted
to rain
could be we’re only attractive when thinking about the past.
I know
how long
you were old.
and god a meal
that switches
bodies
that an insect
misremembers
in the song, my father goes in and out of sleep on a stretcher that his mother took from a movie set.
I like that my teeth protect my teeth.
touch is at first
a bowl
and then
a smaller
bowl
as
for sleep
I’ll die
in yours
she writes
to notice
nothing
god and pain have the same god
kingsoftrain 