04/27/2011
"To know that light falls and fills, often without our/ knowing"--Theodore Roethke
Stop blinking so loud, winking with such perfect pitch.
It's haunted, I think, to think about how often you think about how much thick warm blood is— awake or asleep— rapidly circuiting every inch of every certain second through your head.
And head and body, body and head,
we are all smitten with the same slavers:
same reason why I can't stop walking with anything but my ten toes and two perfect feet, why you refuse to grab at the vast mountains of air, ice and light with anything but your only hands.
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"The insane are right, but they're still the insane."--Franz Wright
The body a country, every citizen a breath.
Then believing that even if your parents
had never been born, nation's founders never
having existed, you never- the-less still would have,
fingernails clipped, lips crimson, eyebrows formed
together, plucked apart. So great the veracity
of your citizenry— long and deep
and slow, each citizen forever different
in peacetime, in war— and always a sovereign
nation of one.
Just to fitlessly sleep to be assured of your country's indomitable greatness.
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"Stories are windows, / so much hacked away."-John Yau
In the winter the flowers turn off and hide censored underground; one of earth's many faring reflexes, a pressure point pushed.
The soil is the living skin of the earth and for months at a time it often scabs white over.
Still even in the winter the sunlight is made up of a thousand, a million many different kinds of colors of light.
The dinosaurs made lots of art he thinks, walking out of the museum, lots of brutal, vicious, bloody art. On the street
he puts on his lucky blue windbreaker, straightens the bill of his favorite hat. Discovers a bouncy ball
in his jacket pocket and starts rapidly bouncing it in-between every once-heaved sidewalk crack.
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Jeff Alessandrelli lives in Lincoln, NE, where he co-curates the latest incarnation of the Clean Part Reading Series. He is the author of the little book Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound (Ravenna Press, 2011); recent work appears in CutBank, Western Humanities Review, Hotel Amerika, DIAGRAM, Forklift, Ohio and Laurel Review.
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