some love poems do not die. [day 11]

Devoted 
with thanks to Julie Plug

Fade in the shimmery curtain. The snarls of her hair.

When she reads about lions, it’s because they’re captured or killed.

Rehearsing. How to wash her
own face with tenderness reserved for strangers.

I associate with others devoted to wounded web.

We would say it’s a need.
Ordinary as dancing hungry animation.

Her precise gesture meaning shields down,
three minutes til the house opens.

Late night labor because I want to.

I’m drinking out of ten different cups.

Reconstruct the punctured testimony
with a donation of your see-through.

The shadow on every dollar a censored kiss.

She gives it back. We adore ourselves in every strange lifetime.

Constructed with words from Kimberly Alidio, Jai Arun Ravine, Ching-In Chen, the Orlando clip (via Jai), Newsha Tavakolian’s Listen installation, Alexander Chee’s “The Querent,” and Little Dragon.

* * *

Prompts:

To [Crowley’s] credit and Harris’s, the deck was, per their wishes, not published until after their deaths. As a gesture it reminds me of E.M. Forster’s decision to keep his novel Maurice back, the novel an open secret he allowed only his friends to read, published after his death. On reflection, it seems to me much of what I love about literature is also what I love about the Tarot—archetypes at play, hidden forces, secrets brought to light. When I bought the deck, it was for the same reason I bought the car—I wanted to feel powerful in the face of my fate. I felt too much like a character in a novel, buffeted by cruel turns of fate. I wanted to look over the top of my life and see what was coming; I wanted to be its author. 

If I were in fact writing a novel about someone like me, of course, this is exactly what would lead him astray.

—Alexander Chee

Kimberly Alidio:   Thoughts on Maya Deren’s “At Land”? The title: “(Silent)”?

Jai Arun Ravine:    

In a tropical ginger from China, some individuals are male in the morning, making pollen, while others are female in the morning, receiving pollen. They switch sexes in the afternoon. This phenomenon, called flexistyly, is known in eleven families of flowering plants. The ginger’s diurnal sex change is not too different from how hamlets mate, where members of a mating pair switch back and forth between male and female once a minute.

- Joan Roughgarden, “EVOLUTION’S RAINBOW”

AND Tilda Swinton as ORLANDO (1992):

Ching-In Chen:

I too have admired the people of this planet.
Their frilly, ordered intellects.
The use they’ve made of cardamom,
radiation as well. How they’ve pasteurized milk, loaned surnames to stars, captured tribes, diseases, streets, and ideas too.

- from Akilah Oliver’s A Toast in the House of Friends 

* * *

Housekeeping

Please post in the comments section of this blog entry with: 1) your writing in response to today’s writing(s) and 2) a prompt or question to share for tomorrow.

And if the comments are down, feel free to send your work to arkipelagirl [at] gmail.com, and I’ll post for you when the comments are fixed. 

Full info on the process and this project can be found at this page.