From Issue 0: Commitment

WHOSOEVER WE ARE

after Rilke


Sought so many sunrises (into) (of) you so many cognitive floods. But what I seized became (such) (almost) artichoke pulp what I pried was (because) a hide. There was a fleece of light to (journey) (glean) from the blade of my scythe a light to data mine for your rot motion of (making visible). Sought so much in (names) (the naming) of whosoever we are to rise (never) (nowhere) in so (flu luminous) unripe bulbs of existence. There was a (barn) (oven) it seeped heat and I saw us (before) (behind) (inside) the fumes of gasoline I’ve (seen) (been) the tanned thawed horizon. Sought the yard sought (gone) lawns in us whosoever we are (product) (perceived) drowned. Stood at points of (made) (trace) into sun (out of) appendage adjunct shadow. Dizzy look for me there (trampling) (tilling) (troubling) thistle mimesis doubling my grain store (ex-erlebnis). There was edible (supply) I was (murderous) alive (prior to) bloom so many wrought rows of (convict) blossoms. Sought moth (found) votive candle where a (kernel) (bud) was the (engine) tic burrows (fraught) inside me wading neck deep empress fields. (Mind) (heart) whosoever we are stood at the seat (of thought) the seat (of feeling) the (entrance of) impossible (ocean) (locution) kitchens behind the (putrefied) (perished) (peril) eye. Constant arrival (beehive) (flight) to find (to plant) presence (never with) reference to (compass) (stifle) the body betrayed. Immerse (pulmonary) (memory) at last there was honey there was trench there was (silence) at last (whosoever we are) dizzying insect. Sought the (carcass) (shelter) sought the mouth of a (parched) delta at last the compost path (remark) (parchment) at last (the denied beauty of synapse blush).

 
 

Léon Spilliaert, Faun by Moonlight, 1900. India ink, black chalk, and colored pencil on paper. Wikimedia.

 

YEARNS


Lullaby chimes for a kiss trapped in my lungs. Send respiration into atrocity language. You must pry for pauses. The suspicious instances of gone most arrivals. I have that itch and I smoke near the hearth in my striped sweater sucking also at a cough drop. My mind is frayed firing menthol into my eyes to combat the combustion I feel against words. Each of my words dwindles its inheritance. In whose country am I your summer monolith? Singed chrysalis sighing the rune of blind monarchs into swine etiquette. The pious posture of wallow and wilt inaugurate my sprawling of narrative debt. The dehumanized is all too human and I am a part of you ineligible to be loved. My entrances are a revolving door. The muse enters without the mantle of her matriarchal Melos. The muse’s exit is simultaneous. My sick lips are inoculated and shocked into an audition for you. Mine is the form that crisis takes. The hearth is warm with harm and taking on the nearest shape of a sorrow. Imagine an encounter that goes unreported by language.

 

Léon Spilliaert, Vertigo, 1908. India ink and colored pencil on paper. Wikimedia.

Jared Daniel Fagen

Jared Daniel Fagen is a Korean-American writer living in Brooklyn and the northern Catskills of New York. His prose poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Lana Turner, Prelude, The Brooklyn Rail, Asymptote, and elsewhere. He is the editor of Black Sun Lit, a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, and an English instructor at The City College of New York.

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Octave 49