by Laura Carter
Paisley Is as White as Nonce of Sky: Desire Is Whiter
You call unto brotherly with a free
hand or a color of surety or sack. When did you
come from
your hand into She-ness of a virtue?
Which of you
is talking
from beyond a pale into a greater fastness or a call?
For who is in this longing with fabulous meritocracy of your hands?
You mean it as you
go forth from your own heartache & far from a higher
armor’s cut well—you touch once, you touch back, a tuché mended higher
-than you have been. How
you go is happier than a first thing you knew:
your nights are certain
& a body is weeping into fire.
You hear in stereo; you hear in stillframes & cum:
layered up around
structure, you plant a sun
& take home.
Surely Ridden Has Known Hun
You saw you from around a corner of yourself You saw
in threes
now
you were
in trenches
coloring
your face with a century’s desire—an opulent maelstrom of exactitude &
crimson—a heart melt-
ing in
a bodily crux
a corpse
over which you stood
as if in a living dream
& swayed along with undulating
rhythm of sole’s
last footpath down
into an open temple where you
were sometimes by yourself & sometimes open to niceties of your theology &
cosmological vision of sea & sand—it’s shifting—you’re opening—you’re not quite certain of an answer to this—
where have you been
o Methadone
& Rimbaud
glass
at heart of a story
You followed along & went there yourself with an army full
of obeisance & glass
as a moral is made of ribbons that one weaves
around center of heartland, body of an America
swept clean by intransigence &
happiness of
your love…
Geometer’s Gymnastics
in strange interpreter a stranger in blouse
a hand
color before you have come
to put yourself here annealing
flame in crux of
each sixteenth-note; a star is a crumbling evisceration of
body & tumult; your melancholy plants itself deep in
each field that you encounter:
You take one knife & place it in-
to fire of your heart,
plant zinnias
at tone’s avowed
parallax at dusk. But when you leave: you take
these things
into
guitarist’s hands: a slipstream of rain, a guarded woman, your own heart’s fire.
You once owned your shoulders but now you own your country….
Laura Carter is a poet and teacher from Atlanta.
RUNDELANIA 