Repetition Nineteen. Mónica de la Torre

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СКАЧАТЬ arresting patterns.

      Or else—

      the ring of those two words roping you in.

      Roped off is the alternative,

      but you know it’s pointless to keep things separate.

      Pretend you are given enough rope.

      What will you do with it next?

      Rope-a-dope.

      While you consider options, I salute

      how quietly you defy flatness,

      your multipurpose materiality.

      Who’s you by the way?

      It’s difficult to say.

      I tangles up easily.

      *

      “the incidental beauty of non-objects”

      *

      A reluctant shaman in the guise of a nuisance—a screeching child—promises to purge us subway riders of our general discontent. Let the wind of change speak through his squalls and babble. Dada. Think of it as anti-poetry produced by tiny but sturdy windpipes. He too embraces the formless, rejects the regime.

      *

      Mobilized is the experience

      of confusion where the familiar is made

      unfamiliar, and vice versa.

      A woman massaged by her partner on the subway platform,

      his fists hot stones: “You’re a scared animal.”

      Did I mishear that?

      Stone in Korean 돌 is also anniversary.

      Precious stones are reminders but other types of petrifaction

      commemorate the past too, change it into object.

      Take stones dangling from a wood beam, they

      appear yielding through sheer optical effect.

      On the opposite end of the spectrum

      are monuments.

      Puddles undo their monumentality, turn

      statues and towers into shimmering surfaces on the sidewalk.

      It’s slippery outside. Hovering cautiously, we too

      negotiate between gravity’s pull

      and our vertical aspirations.

      A mirrored image is a non-material

      photograph, an event.

      The same goes for the choreography of banners waving

      in the air. They announce nothing

      but an otherwise invisible presence.

      It’s audible, though, as if chasing away something.

      Earworms, for one.

      What the wind has to say today it says only in passing.

       Boxed In

      Heads up, false friends use familiarity as camouflage.

      In the source language deciduous might be confused with apathy,

      but nothing could be further away from desidia than the timed

      impermanence of leaves.

      Yes, even forests engage in a form of family planning.

      We took for granted the tree outside our window until it failed to bud.

      A gingko, they cut it down when the building across the street went up.

      Since our view is limited, we like to imagine the situation from the

      missing tree’s perspective.

      Given the recent turn of events, it might have resisted blooming.

      It was protesting its decorative use to boost property values.

      Or perhaps after millennia of honing its particulars, it refused

      “the magic of tree-lined streets.”

      Concrete blocks these social beings’ access to fungal networks,

      prevents their roots from interconnecting.

      Are you a reluctant loner like the specimens that surround us here today?

      I hope you understand I don’t mean to ruin the relationship.

       Intimacy in Discourse:A Comedy In Three Movements

       After paintings by Thomas Nozkowski

       One

      Stick Man steps back

      containing multitudes

      of hues. “Ta-da!” he mouths,

      since he’s mostly

      narrow bands

      of diffused colors,

      a rainbow, faded,

      except for the saturated,

      tender-looking red

      square for a heart

      and the sore ball

      of his left foot

      supporting the tilt.

      Not to mention the display

      of acid green

      on the crown of his head

      and wrist, signaling

      the mind-body connection.

      The histrionics

      in the perfect tension

      between dexter and sinister.

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