Kristen Orser
3 poems from knotted
**
(the ideological murder)
The ideological murder: I killed myself in a discourse of expansion. Still, we continue to speak, but it is twisty twirly talk. Emily suggests we tie all special things together—
with dreamlike precision we put a preposition at the end of things, we tie our
mouths to the paper.
Father: Desire is something on the tip of the tongue and I'm embarrassed by the whole arrangement of your body. Daughter, I've wanted to hit you on the head before, to throw something that would break your skull open, so I could see what it was that made you kiss a cantaloupe and then a boy who wasn't me.
Daughter: I am open mouthed. I am screaming and I want to scream louder, but everyone is dropping small books in my mouth, everyone is waiting for my tongue to fall into my stomach.
Poet: We have love and we do not want to care.
*
*
William chooses to focus on what he knows: There is no doubt that a kiss was intended, but when Joan bent towards him, William swallowed all of Lake Erie. His stomach could not hold it in and William became aware of the fact of his body:
William: But who speaks and with what voice when I am filled with ordinary fears and cleaving burrs?
Joan battles her pathogens. It's April
and there is a self-diluted fool who is drowning in a very ordinary way. He is not thinking of his drowning, he is thinking
of Emily's soft pages, how nothing is clear to him but he remembered a dream that was clear where he was whistling. In real life, the self-diluted fool cannot whistle.
**
(entirely around the earth to avoid any possible confusion)
Joan puts her hand into William's
heart and passing time; Joan pulled out a basket of laundry.
Joan: I've wanted to put my mouth to a cow's udder before. I've wanted to change the shape of your thoughts. Do you think you could unbutton my blouse and let me say someone else's name while you are doing it?
William never answers. The laundry is never finished.
Sometimes in the month, Joan's body is cut in eight pieces. William has taken Emily as a lover, but he calls her Joan when she is sleeping.
The narrator wakes
in the daughter's body. The rain is sideways and the daughter tells her father, I want you like an acorn. And also like a series of short gasps.
Father: You will want a trajectory, a built place, and also the alphabet. It's not possible
to not be a monster. After the flood, we dug up bodies,went to pieces.
An apparition of Joan takes her seat at the dinner table at 5 p.m. and announces,
Joan: What is said is not the story at all, rather what is done.”
**
(along the equator)
Nobody remembers what they were doing before Joan arrived. The characters
in this story are spiky shadows that slowly climb the walls.
When Joan eats dinner, the characters cut open their bodies to find a vernacular. The narrator
sits up and blinds herself in the snow;
the narrator says, “This story won't get told.” There is shouting:
Daughter: I am standing over my father's body and he is thick with description about the time his father took him swimming and made him swim the length of Lake Chautauqua without a break. My father begged his father, “Can I rest on the boat?” and his rowed the boat away from him. My father remembers that he never asked why he was swimming or why he couldn't rest. “I was practical.”
Later, my father was playing baseball when Pearl Harbor was bombed; again, he didn't ask why. Later than that, he went to Korea and tied himself to dead bodies so he could wait for the end of the world.
The father says nothing, but starts to foam at the mouth a little.
Joan: Buzz off. A memory is coming back to me: I can't tell if it's my memory or a memory I am mistaking as my own memory since there are whole things that never happened to me that I deeply believe happened to me: In another life, my mother was my daughter and I shaved her head so she wouldn't have to be a woman. Also, I remember when I couldn't sit still any longer
and I overheard a girl in a pink jumper say, “Can we say love?”
**
return to sawbuck 2.3
**
Kristen Orser is an MFA graduate from Columbia College Chicago where she co-edited Columbia Poetry Review. Currently, she is on the editorial board for South Loop Review and Reconfigurations. Her work has most recently appeared in Ab Ovo, Indefinite Space, If Poetry Journal, Foursquare, Womb Poetry, and elsewhere.
**
(the ideological murder)
The ideological murder: I killed myself in a discourse of expansion. Still, we continue to speak, but it is twisty twirly talk. Emily suggests we tie all special things together—
with dreamlike precision we put a preposition at the end of things, we tie our
mouths to the paper.
Father: Desire is something on the tip of the tongue and I'm embarrassed by the whole arrangement of your body. Daughter, I've wanted to hit you on the head before, to throw something that would break your skull open, so I could see what it was that made you kiss a cantaloupe and then a boy who wasn't me.
Daughter: I am open mouthed. I am screaming and I want to scream louder, but everyone is dropping small books in my mouth, everyone is waiting for my tongue to fall into my stomach.
Poet: We have love and we do not want to care.
*
*
William chooses to focus on what he knows: There is no doubt that a kiss was intended, but when Joan bent towards him, William swallowed all of Lake Erie. His stomach could not hold it in and William became aware of the fact of his body:
William: But who speaks and with what voice when I am filled with ordinary fears and cleaving burrs?
Joan battles her pathogens. It's April
and there is a self-diluted fool who is drowning in a very ordinary way. He is not thinking of his drowning, he is thinking
of Emily's soft pages, how nothing is clear to him but he remembered a dream that was clear where he was whistling. In real life, the self-diluted fool cannot whistle.
**
(entirely around the earth to avoid any possible confusion)
Joan puts her hand into William's
heart and passing time; Joan pulled out a basket of laundry.
Joan: I've wanted to put my mouth to a cow's udder before. I've wanted to change the shape of your thoughts. Do you think you could unbutton my blouse and let me say someone else's name while you are doing it?
William never answers. The laundry is never finished.
Sometimes in the month, Joan's body is cut in eight pieces. William has taken Emily as a lover, but he calls her Joan when she is sleeping.
The narrator wakes
in the daughter's body. The rain is sideways and the daughter tells her father, I want you like an acorn. And also like a series of short gasps.
Father: You will want a trajectory, a built place, and also the alphabet. It's not possible
to not be a monster. After the flood, we dug up bodies,went to pieces.
An apparition of Joan takes her seat at the dinner table at 5 p.m. and announces,
Joan: What is said is not the story at all, rather what is done.”
**
(along the equator)
Nobody remembers what they were doing before Joan arrived. The characters
in this story are spiky shadows that slowly climb the walls.
When Joan eats dinner, the characters cut open their bodies to find a vernacular. The narrator
sits up and blinds herself in the snow;
the narrator says, “This story won't get told.” There is shouting:
Daughter: I am standing over my father's body and he is thick with description about the time his father took him swimming and made him swim the length of Lake Chautauqua without a break. My father begged his father, “Can I rest on the boat?” and his rowed the boat away from him. My father remembers that he never asked why he was swimming or why he couldn't rest. “I was practical.”
Later, my father was playing baseball when Pearl Harbor was bombed; again, he didn't ask why. Later than that, he went to Korea and tied himself to dead bodies so he could wait for the end of the world.
The father says nothing, but starts to foam at the mouth a little.
Joan: Buzz off. A memory is coming back to me: I can't tell if it's my memory or a memory I am mistaking as my own memory since there are whole things that never happened to me that I deeply believe happened to me: In another life, my mother was my daughter and I shaved her head so she wouldn't have to be a woman. Also, I remember when I couldn't sit still any longer
and I overheard a girl in a pink jumper say, “Can we say love?”
**
return to sawbuck 2.3
**
Kristen Orser is an MFA graduate from Columbia College Chicago where she co-edited Columbia Poetry Review. Currently, she is on the editorial board for South Loop Review and Reconfigurations. Her work has most recently appeared in Ab Ovo, Indefinite Space, If Poetry Journal, Foursquare, Womb Poetry, and elsewhere.
Labels: 2.3, kristen orser
