It is a secret life that denies the double. From grief to grief goes a new strain of quiet. Rain of quiet, we wrote earlier. Did you know we were together? No god but this ghost of a thing that never was.
in every house a late arriving room
–
I remember
more often than you
being poor
–
god talks that way to distract the mourners
A mid-day animal on land dumbstruck by the holy effort it takes to forget god. The nocturnal grief of apples. Alien and angel having a quiet moment before abducting from the high-dive our least favorite swimmer. The naming of the star my cigarettes worship. A pawprint sleeping on a heartbroken whale.
A palm overtaken by the long audience of touch, a hand
left for god
by a spider, a child
packing snow into the dream of a mother’s knee,
a shadow
eaten by a rock, a rock
eating nothing
in a church, the angel
assigned
to a lost
microscope, the order
in which
we’re imagined
fog’s invisible feast, a flashlight
kissing the itch on the face
of god, the toy
baths our machines worship, the hunger
that returns my ear to my father’s
stomach, the soundless
fasting
of owls, the first camera
that knew what would happen
Black lives matter.
read Hanif Abdurraqib. Scott Woods. Camonghne Felix. Bettina Judd. Barbara Fant.
read Black.
place your body when and where and however you can.
{isacoustic*} is on hiatus.
a god touching itself in the ghost of a shy hand model. a boy failing to piss on an animal born to kiss nothing. a radar’s unreachable dream of giving blood. a daughter’s pillow for rabbit police. a shoeless painter’s sleeping bread. an earful of sugar with an ant for a mouth. an invisible puppet based on the death of a slowly named fish. no then no in the no of this field.
T.M. Semrad is a poet and writer. Her writing has appeared in Entropy, Nightingale & Sparrow, Pomme Journal and the Black Clock blog. She has an M.F.A. in Writing from the California Institute of the Arts and was a recipient of a UCLA Writing Project Fellowship.
*
~~~
My birth month May’s magic – Jacarandas
color the air lavender. Corolla
carpet streets and sidewalks so that the world
softens. Still tires and soles
crush petals into an oily smudge.
The world buried beneath a fairy haze
exudes a rank perfume.
Absent Affirmation
A selfie, my mother’s doppelganger, deleted
~~~
I celebrate father, hold up
his present, my face an aching grin
to give him a gift who gifted me. Later,
when I am grown,
he and I will walk together
alone, rehearsing for this future
on a dirt road between two irrigation ditches,
our two shadows stretched, his to the…
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