LARESSA DICKEY

 

 

 

 

I won't keep you

 

Together matter/mater/mate

Bones restitched, a general blushing

Outside knowledge, corrective cartography

undoing your codes your man boys—

Shoulder hitched up to compensate for the load;

a woman losing hair because she twists it

Here they make her stay inside but there

stared at children braiding hair, husk

Kernel. Wider rather narrow, exhibition you move through

or touch lips of logic

Splits from you in leaf veins, deep green collards

I mention this

 

ºº

 

You splits from you, my time on heart attacks

Pump pump huff don't hug me

I know when to get under covers

She keeps the house he has the phone

Veins in leaves but those connotations are fake

Another city I’ll just leave, veins

What goes I send your broken fingers, acres of cucumbers
thrown away

The end of this is a quiet room

Heart vein taking from roots from collared trees

 

Swoop, castral, flight of reasons

Stay a mammal in the cloakroom

How revenge is flight
All childhood an immigration

Pretentious in form, those reptiles

Glaciers and swans and melting bergs; birds nurse them

You will never get to the bottom,

[then BOOM]

 

ºº

 

Roost they look it in the eye your hand my hand

My hand a fossil top-down, pre history, crane of falcon

he/she a far off space

Tell it is like it is | you talk too much

To continually discover the part that's strange

Will remember the recipes when time comes

 

Same faces lapping up on shore, little sardines

Blowing up every god creature that moves

Language impossible with neighbors, contrary, they do it

A bunch of people don't make a person
I don't know

There's something in the water

 

You see what's needed, you do it

What you say inside I can't sleep here

 

ºº

 

He rubs salve into his heart when no one's around

Jumps under the rain of radioactivity to go ahead

and blind himself

Matching their patterns so they don't feel fear

Had I been his lover

Had I under the ghost of leaves still mid-air

Something in the lungs, helicopter seeds return, free men

Eyes, spindles and distant fires

Bones floating in soft tissue

South parade, cheapside seats

 

ºº

 

A women walks covering her face with sense

The nature of looking into a Buddhist shop, full of red candles

Single sheets of yellowing papers

Pylon unconsciousness

Full silent, the lace market moving

Outside just enough dust on everything

I hear my plants their little blossoms
reach to darkness

A quarter century nothing to squawk about

She screams no more fucking nukes and I've seen that

Men pouring sunburns, shoving sunlight into guns

Flashing lights ahead of themselves

I say it plain I say it plain I say it plain

Canasta is a bad farmer, church just faint precision

The cross cross lattice and the flowering beans

Little silver dipper in the rock spring someone left it

hung by a nail

I look at my hands and wait

 

 

 

Laressa Dickey is a writer based in Berlin. She's the author of several chapbooks including A Piece of Information About His Invisibility and apparatus for manufacturing sunset, and the poetry collection Bottomland (Shearsman). Two books are forthcoming: Roam (Shearsman) in 2016, and Twang (Backwaters Press) in 2017.