mother in mouse slippers sees a rainbow and burns the bread. fucking rainbow was hunger before someone tried to erase it. I am not god but I do have insomnia. mother can do in her madness what most can in sleep. father hollers at a soldier suffering from memory gain. I throw baby brother’s rattle over a moving tank.
count for the dead their black sheep.
language keeps us from understanding the world.
spoken, it is god finding god.
spoken, it is the white male
white
emulation-delayed
male
writing his father
of this thing
that’s a thing-
infant wrestling as a cure for road rage.
Q: what do crows eat?
A: they don’t.
Q: do they eat stars?
–
a fight with my brother
ends
when it’s my turn
to fake
my life
–
as a language, our food spoils
or mother
makes
the same
dish
–
where does my tongue die?
the bomb
went off
moved
and went off
again
mom
–
at birth
a mouth
is born
mom
–
I keep
popping up
in their pictures
mom
smearing mud on her tits to cool the baby.
trying
to burn
dirt.
like a scar, some father
reciting
the same
verse.
if his ears can hear one thing
how does he know it’s god
how does she know
there are two
Moving In With the Dalai Lama
Poems, Lisa Gordon
2015
http://bookthug.ca/shop/chapbooks/moving-in-with-the-dalai-lama-by-lisa-gordon/
–
review by Barton Smock
–
I’ve fallen asleep with the television remote in my lap. I am dreaming of myself as a boy beside a boy who’s stolen his father’s fossil brush. The two of us are working to get our stories straight for the poet Lisa Gordon whose first poem in her collection Moving In With the Dalai Lama opens with the line I’m going to clot my stories with first comings-. It’s an apt beginning for a book of poems whose author writes first what comes next.
I’m awake now, I’m alone, and the book moves to a rhythm of tentative inquiry. A rhythm that produces search results for surrogates.
Antoine died of cancer this week. Large man with a heart like a broken
boomerang. At the funeral, a baby nursed behind a coffin.
from You Take Your Chances
I develop a unique stutter and use it to respond to a sameness of experience.
We talk in riddles without meaning to- a popular fate.
from Chinese Slippers
All fates are popular, every stutter unique. An answer is a number unaware it’s being followed. As a poet, Gordon gives her symbols the space they need to become shells of a former costume.
I can’t do it- you do the math. Answers. Lack of viable exchange.
Tonight I’m as wizen as any woman entering crow…
from Back Up
To enter is human.
Giraffes have such a soothing lope on the television screen.
I’m going to make a movie where all the animals exchange feet.
from Auspicious
I am trying to remember my dream. I am alone in a room like something alone in a box. I was put here to be heavy. I imagine god gets angry when he realizes he’s come alone to lift what he can’t.
I’m going to swim stark naked, pretend I’m merely obeying…
from Auspicious
A row boat’s bottom so fragile you can step clean through.
I’ve found memory to be almost friendly, if I don’t apply pressure.
from Perishable Emotives
In Moving In With the Dalai Lama, Lisa Gordon commits acts of proximity that don’t hit close to home but instead challenge the gestural foreignness in which they were conceived. Pack your things, it’s a lovely book.
mother is in the zone. is writing a birth scene for a specific kind of person. she has this window she’s named god’s narrow. my only job is to leave my father alone. I am allowed one imaginary friend as long as it’s a boy when I share it with my brother. it keeps getting sick from being around other kids my age. when I catch a snake I tell it satan had to worry about being you first. I hear almost nothing because I want the voice to be perfect. it will say I had, quite by accident, become evil or it will say finish your bathwater.
kingsoftrain 