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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I have my pipe
and you
your cigarette
each
our bone
with a raindrop
in it
our grandfathers
are dead
are still
dead
and we’re
near a water
a water that is really
a circle
afraid
of stick figures
some of which
I still
draw
their invisible
zeroes
kissing
in a thunderstorm
that god
can’t remember
Knowing one will have a seizure that the others can watch, ache invents three empty-handed people who are closely based on the two still dying on the roof of a strip club. My first thought upon seeing any horse is that each horse is all the time thinking of its mother. I wait not to be taken but to be taken by the alien attracted to god. The family we don’t talk about burns trash in a silent film. No woman loves grief, but will check its facts.
~
what nightmares might boats have. do small bits of Hansel and Gretel enter the oral history of stowaways. oh pacing son of god, why does father worry his belly over an ant at peace
inside
of a worm. what if our whales are mostly absence and death passes me like a room
~
At the end of the day, it’s a very long day. The mirror believes it’s covered its belly. You ask me what hurts and I say earshot and show you the traffic cone my mother lifted from the world of tire swings. Everything you’ve written about the void being free is true. I secretly want your fingerprint and you secretly collect stock images of the born again. Will god never finish
the wind
~
and its use? this yearning, this alien attendance to the unsupervised moment? a childhood, perhaps. rugburns on the bellies of those who fall asleep to the song of you swimming from the water in your body. god returning to find again that our absence has been rearranged by the last infant to receive nostalgia. our self-harming sock puppets fresh from the diary of touch. an egg in the churchbell’s brain.
~
There is a part of my left hand that seems to know a fish with a nosebleed. If I could open the book of touch, I would open the book of touch. My son has a cough that haunts the leg of a wasp and his singing lives in a blank mother’s bottle of glue. Death recognizes more creatures than god.
kingsoftrain 