Scantily Clad Press, 2009
samuel huntington he can’t put his finger on it, nor can it rain nor can he voice it nor can a sound but the clause asserts, until. i am moving back in impermanence and would like not to leave importance in the trunk false start, kachunk hiccup, false parting. who are you lonely stranger who are publicly calling and writing to everyone i was once guilty of truth that imperfect inadequate noun; i feigned allegiance with another sort of tautology i feigned interest in nonexisting like it was a mass to attend but i’m back thick headed morally asundered really ready for confrontation of hemispheres sweet samuel huntington sweet prose doctor, come back in my life write 49 chapters of 49 months since we consummated like children happy birthday. i’ll lick you there voraciously even if you like it. ravage plumage spring’s male birds calling out again, and we are sitting down for brunch with an incomplete circle, unformed clause, and desire or reverence. madison waiting up on a hill or at the end of moving trains stoically divorcer. madison entails plumage and flying on smokestacks i should give you wallace s. before we commence brunch ashes and berries are never quite removable stains from our tablecloth. if you flip through the pages of my notebook only untold secrets
will disarm your love for the genuine —i assure you it’s no good idea.
the Aral a place like michigan is no place for surrender michigan might be commonwealth of running denial interior thought-moons irregular and transfixed, diurnal nightshade, michigan my dear encroaching landscape and nightshades. do you find that a beltline provides sufficient boundary or state lines covert operational procedure suspicious-drug-run interrogation at the border—no sir i’m just moving (my family) around the world and looking for a new conscience in this great interior beeflined and beet red this gigantic inferiority in the sun and a place i’m alien we’re all absolutely irreplaceable until we’re gone somehow they make do in absence, like eternity, this absinthe -colored nightshade. like a pantoum i will carry you absinthe out among great wondrous bleak interior roughness suburbs cut with skytrains leaving the end of your thought-train strained yet satisfied in predictable fading and re-cycle. i don’t any longer bother with the city until i do. sufficiently fading bodies, the Aral superiorly tops environmental envy. what texture can provide is limitation and recessive lakes.
north pole we came for the insanctity of it blood and soap din and lint i fell in love like that once too with a north pole nocturnal reckoning a redistribution of variables question for the sanitation of it for the sane trip of it did i trace footsteps walk a path wrought on late night prayer channel i donated my will as precious seed and the harvest has been everlastingly absent i have a cold weather attitude to get through town multiplexed like a Russian fiction character in St. Petersburg lies to his wife about murder to hesitate the redistribution of things. to encourage it. an old regimed futurist landscape come now towards lakes where clear-headed reside there we imagine fruitful hypotheses not tricks i no longer hold sway in the Northern fruit harvest this cat approaches: i read your paper and resolved it now let’s be in love
pioneer days hope it was an argument about philosophy there late while no one looked there displaced long emotions with intellectual crises our signifiers tended to do that, replacing this love for that one. i can’t transfer my belongings over space the way you can, i have lied in memory a red field invites participants besides mice but i have lied to make recovery that much easier red blooms. a national consciousness of the loss of strangers also a lie that lay internal and putrefied foreign procedures, the agents scrambling escalators without any hierarchy it’s just lying. the psychology of the twist in perception we strive towards survival which indicates bent wheel away from flippancy rolling over spindoctors. this flashy newness is somewhere between admittance and avoidance: that is flippancy and survival. sarcasm takes fearlessness and brave eyes to the faultline. dateless so no bolshevik revolution any fervor distracts my desire to go unarmed in american individualism like those great forging wagon trains burying memories and babies in dusty tracks. i just bury you, first i enticed your affection to receive it when it would come from nowhere heart of darkness to receive significance reassured my humanity —sex appeal in my sweet sad bonnet and lace you turned me backwards and moaned we liked it i wanted fixation until the wagon train stopped and
the great serious Oz still stared from New England —your sexmule broke a leg, i tired my little ankles we landed in Oregon with the storks following, remainders fleeing Tashkent. where are the sturgeon now, bring them to america. write me a letter persuasively, don’t let me leave for Boston or i’ll leave for the Aral. what trip diary kept finally read aloud— pioneer days: 1. kept a small fire glowing red hot embers in the first camp, Tennessee, drew bubbling mineral water later on and caught in a locket you travel with still-burning embers embraced by cold bubbling water. they don’t go out. 2. this heatfog is intense, mother left the wagon for one headed north to minnesota territory, why we don’t know. we lost the map too and move so slowly following fresh graveyard and stinking wreaked cattle. 3. vultures circle our wagon as we approach valleys where you could be where are we. dust doesn’t settle i’m thinking i’ll walk off into the pine trees with the locket, not come back, looking for you, winslow and margaret make buckwheat and hunt for anything the size of a worthwhile rabbit we’d eat cats and grub if it comes to it. drop me off in wyoming in that romantic period in those winds i’ll come find you. tiring of winslow and mending shirts darning the imaginary children’s socks they don’t open eyes anymore the terrain breeds distinct forgetfulness. wishfulness. moonshine.
4. crossed another train yesterday and held up for flour and flood we produced our charmless lace bonnets now withered without mistake. i discovered a dead stork only just decomposing, we made do with bones like dogs. winslow i said i’m leaving off for wyoming even if and especially you slip into a great salt lake with sharks. what can we do, the sun & wind. no diverted stream patterns, fallen leaves at least keep dust down we manage hollow smiles. 5. we lost oxen yesterday i’m leaving shortly too. consumption or dysentery, losing blood not to mention passion for the great open road. will wander off without winslow i’ve slipped beyond speaking the parlance of New England, but that floating spirit comes in dreams comes toward the ocean coast beckoning back to Boston. i could walk the length backwards from this pacified region. sorry i didn’t mention to winslow i never wanted anything more than oak trees this journey was only in desire.
prairies walked out to the beach on the lake on the sea interior priorities kept flowing at riverhead missouri steamship probe upriver otters canoes hands small of complicity we took the horse out back and shooted it up, no choice. here on the plains with such open space we have certainties when the sky touches earth on all sides. a complete plastic holding with a full hooking lid. don't mind being from kansas or this illegitimate daughter who has found her boots under the porch again. corn and wheat tomcats boredom. when you're expecting a good harvest from the precious seed and it doesn't come, or does it. give anyway. i could use work in translation and mythology to create a more well-rounded totality, ignorant of train wrecks or derailments. catching up on historical perspectives and political modes because we spent four months traveling dustily from kansas to utah and landing in wyoming was converging forces. grandparents settled slightly east, found land of lakes, where mother desired. so many pages hath come into light and so many are stuck unnamed. slight realization as we pitch camp or stake down to homestead—life in the future will only have more plans and psychic illness, clinging to survival is what wagon trains are good at, not sublime success. the kids from milwaukee said later in my dreams the license plates look west, forever mourning cliffs and bridges. bring us some open expanse where health is given an eternity we've forgotten in traintracks and smoke. physical
survival in my dreams imagines dustbowl rations putrefaction, desire for rain. but out among these grasslands we're content with clapboard and chickens because it's wide open so the little life isn't stuck. why i dream of nightshade wagon trains carrying chinese eggplant from Talin to Oln, for the dragon cafes and cowboy coffee. why i dream of rattling nighthawks alone in their cages and streams of steam rushing out of your hinges.
sundance you're coming back! sea's interior salt spring sea lion caves and now what will you do. what expectations what dramadurge drugged up my explosive intentions, and now just forgetful and listless, exhaustion after two thousand cyclical miles and no broken patterns. your family laying off the moonshine and train-dust to wait side by side on the side of a stream foothills of not-even-wise letting go. but for the helplessness of it, again just survival when you make a pact to travel across country and leave the dog on doorstep shoot the horses out back, what space is left for swimming pools wildest dreams, windchimes. we pawned those too to buy cross-country skis that time we fled the mtns after debt collectors located fridaynight northern exposure posterchild cabin in the olympics. oh your olympics, oh your olympics. now the trains and cattle move from Dayton Ohio, more pencils please for the passengers and their postcards. old time union travel letters had no special place for the stamp, just paste anywhere. colored autographs of my lace kerchief his steeled boots, the wrinkled sunned foreheads. you shrink in the civil war, grow in modernity. set out cameras mapify maternal wildernesses place schooners in the last great bay. generators hum while grizzlies dance to the sound of your arrival on the banks of no new elated festival
janjaweed janjaweed exile and bomb-testing snoop-dogs mr. holmes says politics=politics janjaweed prisoners and pleading tribal disparities —all we want is safe voyage in this lifetime, all secure along national borders drawing on a history of civilian war, north vs. south iron warships cannonfodder. blame the excusable ones for our exile & nonchalant Sunday mornings. we’ve left interior behind, maternal nesting modernity left it sourly in the civil past. i hope you know where you came from, otherwise you’re utterly free skin. this isn’t a political isolation of the news this is inside and outside collapsed intermingled for the kindness of it. absolute lying in light words, marriage counseling, grasp & punctuate. Casablanca rabat morocco my brother omar maha is twenty-two.
Diyala & Baquba long standing against the door locked against solicitors Sunday afternoon witnesses things & ideas to sell. unlike what happens outside the house with airy movement chains and whistles easily break doors down or use metal machines in punctuating verbs to intimidate. in other airy worlds stand outside while the solicitors search their house against the deadbolt for fear of exhaustion of baquba offering us sweet treats or diyala selling internet packages. inescapable fear of the bottom dollar bottom line. let baquba in a while sit by the fire stroke the cat play football barefoot with non-native english speakers in the dust. delusions what witnesses to stand in front of your doors and entertain your children, headdress ready. at night fire rages in wheat fields and mind.
half-life you in a dream last night holding infant on the high hills of madison you walking with your parent i don’t recognize you i didn’t recognize my sister pointed to the sidewalk this might get kind of awkward in a colloquial turn of phrase, i’m leaning there’s a full barrel a full leaning toward the formal ‘in event’ aside lyre after all the playful front yard badminton of language i’m leaning farther toward the human gaze the trajectory half-life
doodle kandahar and almighty (almaty) flowing red black & white through our newspapers bamboo shoots for springtime and the tomcat’s fresh catch. concept of carnival was preciously close to instigating revolution secluded patties & folk wisdom beliefs for tuesday’s slow shirt winks french political runner up, fireplace deals. stealing my legs away from the race or a shot put rotation to set a record, i found a simple trail off the main road for doddlers, like yourself. doddle here, or doodle. dabble doddlers done right. isolation queen isolation margin. fed slowly quick bubbles i’m out of center revolver, obsoletion in question dancescene gone awry williams & the embodiment of knowledge and sand. shaky slop slap drool: i’m writing a book. these times don’t move anyone towards touching, excesses in excess touching a revved up super steroid, a hopeful wishful, a less than lonely.
Natalie Knight lives in upstate New York where she is a PhD student and Carson Carr Diversity Scholar at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her chapbook Xenia is forthcoming from Furniture Press in 2009. She is currently finishing a collection of poems entitled ARCHIPELAGOS. Excerpts can be found online at Octopus. She has performed in Rodrigo Toscano's Collapsible Poetics Theater and has participated, over the course of five months, in a group reading/sounding of Finnegans Wake. Originally from Western Washington, she has a BA from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA.