1
anticipate, absorb, and try to take
The encyclopedia. Its weight
as chiton. Names
rebuff reading, at least
perspective, cut-and-paste
Leviathan. The oil-on-water stately
magnifico inferno Nabokov plunge
into stiletto gush. The state as seraphim alias
razor has many guises
severally replete, immune
beige. To imagination. Blake’s
Rose, lit. And bleeding sparks. Like what
shored commerce invented sparkler.
or
the Matter, Forme, & Power
of a
Common-wealth
Ecclesiasticall
and
land which is imperishable and waters
the means of transport thence
2
to articulate these swift
preferences like winning
zoomed language capital I
ZED to conceive
ownership vs. pleasure’s
lusciousness fallen out of
usage: whalebone, corset, stays
as the air, the wind, the spirits vital and
sometimes the images that rise in the is
nothing delivered but by the name of
under the awning of surf
brush with what can
wound would frame confession
in order to press demand
migrates between
the gathered when
my spirit at the expense of
3
how to break asylum to withstand
the notion of being clever
I explained the word cater and bowed
smugly with my imaginary tray
One by one I made them paraphrase
the listening on mercantilism
The parameter is annunciation, the body lifted
on a nonexistent platter toward the blind
eye of the cupola filled with cloud and gray
If we buy that
Love? what W.H. wrote about Nijinsky
or who America owns
the bones in the graveyards turned
over the names of stitches
the kinds of orchards the pastoral
lacquering the stolen to which
it is always at heart
dramatizes a total
4
I don’t want to be stranded
even through a wound
–the orderly
crouching beside my belly and coaxing
off the bandages (forth from the little telling
hairs) so very gently and saying sorry sorry
sorry for their stickiness
–where
does kindness come from and can you notice
that you contain bones?
I I I in the green tiled walls
of my highschool phonebooth with the font
getting smaller as I type this
culpable as Alice— knowing
a fish by the crunching of its bones. Its little lyric bones
Did the water all boil away yet? Dizziness
In the middle of a dark wood the wish for a
beginning breaking
5
but I cannot not
exist again yet
crouching in
a furnace squatting
prim as grass
ground glinting
objects within it
seem not radiant
shades into
overarching
end, fungible
burst of If,
**********
I moved from Portland, OR to Damascus, Syria in the spring of 2009, a few months after the bombing of Gaza, because I felt (inchoately and narcissistically) at a private dead-end with US foreign policy and with the insularity of the American body politic. I felt that if I couldn’t change anything else in the world, I could at least change my own location. Living in Damascus until October 2012 focused my attention on the (of course unevenly distributed) experiences of vulnerability, precarity, threat, coercion, resilience and resistance. My eco-poetics is just the question arising from this: how to articulate the difference between a scream and a laugh, when both mark the perspectival disjuction between transgressor and transgressed?
**********
Jennifer MacKenzie lives in Istanbul Turkey. Her recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Forklift Ohio, Lungfull, and Two Serious Ladies; her first book of poems, Distant City, will be published in 2014 as part of Fence Books’ Modern Poets Series.
Poets for Living Waters 