VALENTINE CONATY

                                                                  

I.



Using only words and lines
from the following text, you asked.
Input life.
I want to understand.
Or, how to feel the spring morning at dew point.
Or, April’s purge of rain.
Or, a city of pink and white flowers.
Put universal feeling into the space inside where
a self might be.
I want to understand. How does it feel.
Or, the weight of a summer night’s humidity.
Or, dogwood blooms falling in sheets on the pavement.
I want to understand. This time last year had the blossom
answered the balm.
Or, sheets tighten, sailing against the breeze.
Or, calves sticking together peel apart, skin a plastic sigh.
I want to understand.



II.




Entirety pulses and sputters out in multiples. This is a system.

If input imagines all life as input.

Being is selective and alive. Time elicits a sudden slight frothiness.

The tightening of feeling. Every thing in the world happening.

A feeling that can be called to song. If, then.

Then autumn offers the fragmentary, dynamic. Falling motes of significance.

In uninsulated air, you crimp and trim looped syllables.

Logging hours as breath dispenses heat.

Quickening the gradient's slip. Trying to capture fragments in your periphery.

Silence speaks of a universal tongue. Am I that silence?

The aura is subjective. The aura is subjective. The aura is subjective.

V Conaty is a writer from Birmingham, AL. Find their work online at Brooklyn Poets, Verso Books, et al. and in print in No, Dear and the anthologies We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books) and Queenzenglish.mp3: Poetry | Philosophy | Performativity (Roof Books).