OBJECT REALITY
The tree becomes a tree only when I say so.
The branch comes into view when I say branch.
So, I say it again, and again: branch, branch.
It’s the tree. Singing through and out me.
Like an angel. Spreading its wings wide. And green.
A hundred futures sparking without me.
Then, I’m astride your waist, shirtless, grinning.
I say: you. The difference between first person
and second collapses. All my old shadows
disperse in the light. My new shadow, I could call
it anything. And all my dead are my dead.
My dead: a flurry of years. I’m singing.
My shoulders arc into two clear beams.
And I become nothing like what I saw.
SOME ODYSSEY
Gold, in the distance, the leaves, the leaves, the.
Vision stickering together two operatic sets: wildwood foregrounded by a glass cage on wheels.
What is inside is inside is me.
Eyes bloom on my palms: everything I hold I see.
Sunlight roves over the windshield. Brittle, refracting into intangible dust, dust.
A hand grips a thigh.
A cerberus barks, in someone’s yard, somewhere up on the hill, corded over its own sound, the wind’s
metallic whip.
Electricity chirrups through me.
Around ankles denim shorts crush.
My face in his lap. Palm on the back of my head.
As the cars drive past.
As the cars.
Horizon.
O horizon.
Biographical Statement
Temperance Aghamohammadi is an Acolyte of the Exquisite. An Iranian-American poet, medium, and critic, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, Passages North, The Kenyon Review, Annulet, and elsewhere. Hailing from the Northeast, she currently haunts the Midwest.