aroma decline common program
after angelica liddell / after gala mukomolova
recall the flavor of our conversations,
damp air words army-crawling over tongue,
flip it in your mouth so it lands again and sizzles
new. you can’t know anything fully until it’s over.
when i say, i have already begun to mourn
our time together, i mean what i said, i mean
i have stared through us in a long mirror, seen
you alone through windows and thought that
person looks like they’re chained to themselves
“i’ll wait for you” sounds beautiful in any accent.
recall seeing an idol in the canteen: fandom is kind
of love, but distant and performing itself. reconciling
her curling lipstick with the version of her she played
last night: beating her chest, real-wailing, “some of us
exist without ever deserving it,” and isn’t
that it? translated us fighting and not-fighting
against this wili? this shapeless nameless?
this placeless? sheer veil, opaque veil,
what matters is the weight intimating the shape.
the new work peeled imagery from Victorian Hidden
Mother Photography: the idea that beneath
the blanket, there is mother holding you
and keeping you still. in a crazy way my life
flashes before my eyes in every banal half-thing:
sneaker falling to catch a stair that was never there
and my heart do stop. and there it is: me rollerblading
or really just being dragged by a dog, affections snagging
in the carabiner earring of a boy who speaks italian
and german and french and spanish and just
smiles when i talk, and a hundred museums audio tours.
and somewhere, pinning all of it to floral sheets—
there is you, unable to grasp anything after 2009,
humming top 40 and shrugging when i ask you
the title. there’s a gala poem about your dead body
climbing up next to you, but if i look it up,
it’ll shrink me to swallow size again. washed down
by a beloved. perhaps even performance:
time-based. you’ve got to be there or miss it.
i love watching people fight in french: singing shallow
and spitting vodka in each other’s faces: it’s a threat
to throw each other onto the train tracks. i’ve been
saying that lately instead of fall on the sword,
dying gut hugging steel inside rings too familiar.
speaking of through windows— there’s a photo
by martine franck. another inside-baseball portrait
of a white master and he looks so different, skin matted
out by the oozing glass. i saw a play about chat.
that’s a reductive description: it’s a threat
for so long,—the difference becomes a virtuality.
it’s not a thing, it’s just closing the windows
so the day can’t wedge figures in, parking
us in my blind spot with the hazards on,
just trying to find a place we can sit still
for free. i’m wrapping my skin green
in cheap chain jewelry and chlorine halos.
i want to pray forever until the air goes
heaving pink and the particles love-flush.
so, whole plane goes wave field synthesis
until we can whisper to each other through
thick hotel sheets and distance weaves itself
flat between two warm metal plates.
my molt-white iris trained on desire
while its density undulates. a beating
heart you can move through now. instead
of the earth turning on the vamp-in-the-box,
imagine the light turning black each night:
whole days burning like white toast: aroma
as indicator of decline.
two doors in the vestibule, and i can count
every unperishable thing in that stride, that span.
i imagine myself sitting upright in my casket,
marshalling myself through slime membrane
and my childhood dog is there, barking approximations,
and smelling like a used-up citronella coil.
an object can radiate pleasure on the palm, and still
be repulsive. species like specialization like mutated:
i could be a whole pack of wild dogs under this soft
organ. you could be 1000 honeymoons perforating
a bolt of blue suede, and i wouldn’t know,
you could be here right next to me: inside
suit of swords: a matador’s inflamed red cape
riding the heat like a slouching motorcycle.
generously turned on memory spit,
golden and aromatic after raw potentiality
not a gift, but a transaction. i turn us to this,
and we move aside: burn the braid closed for fantasy.
Zach Blackwood is a poet and contemporary performance curator in Philadelphia, PA. He is the author of SEXY UNIQUE HOLLOW POINT out now from Glo Worm Press. He has poems published in Peach Mag, Occulum, Bedfellows Magazine, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He is available on the world wide web @blackwhom.