Jessica Grim

Tillage

Let me explain some

geography to you

in the

farmlands’ front yard

recasting of

overtures—

tender

attempts to vocalize signs for

“friend” in

which the usual fusion

unglues

them trying
out toughness

instinct on the

stint increasingly

legit

it’s

all sightline—

tolerated well

isolated this

leaving it the

absolute

shutdown

wanting but not

wanting to know where

a person in the void below

placing a sound inside another sound

as the

degenerative written

tasks

never

in the main

ritual stigma

as if an island in the midst

these days clouded or

are they clotted

just another day on the prairie,

beginners are told to concentrate on their

breathing only why is a visit so

appealing

their conquering stare

threshold of words words w/out

entry at all

coinciding w/

this day’s close blue—

only slenderest branches move

the most dependable of silences

chronology and other factual data. an emotional history. as it lived there.

sum up how you move

vocabulary was

greener a way of having

acclimatized basement someone

wonders – though

not now not

over all

this summer sky

microscopic lines connecting you w/

they in their cubist

pluralized, seriously

diurnal,

flip-top, open frame to

the present

moving into thinking about

trumpet vine’s revival—

Pleistocene cartilage cod glue

ruminant

no re-up

oriented a

solitude which is

properly made much of produces—

a book explaining wind

serviceable taxonomy oven-

proof hysteria

the heat & humidity

suffocate we are living lives still the way we

impediment performs again but w/ less

silhouette sad silvery

cicada hums “blossom end rot”

stops

garden in mid-cry

a graceful thing an

open and

wide

thing

a practical entropy

this

distinctive span our

summers’

icthiary contusion

green wall awash in adversarial

tongue hold demand elations

home sweet attitudinal home

reshift shorefront tedium salutary dawn to welcome

spin momentum

creasing and folding up on itself along

longitudinal go

on and pack up your stuff your

bifurcations, peach stones, soft shoulder

sleeps’

drear tones of

sepia

was it birds or rats or

some other

notifiable

peaceful

more like an interruption in the calamity

at the hinge more oil is applied

quiet paragons

platelets exacting

the same as ever

you shape up that grammar

ray of warmth upon

the fetid swamp

late summer night carrying on

our having wakened

again

I can freely believe this

a kind of charred

dilapidation dawns purple deepened

the curiously planed mechanism of

those mishandled starts—

crushed hemisphere

populous, knickered

truly original cleft

nuance w/out peer

a singularly black morning

hand held out just so

a thousand provocations this

rain falling

content sputters sidewalk

flops up to meet your

foot the aquatic “blip” of

sound reduction

its

relationship to memory

a wing and a leaf how

quiet

insubstantial

quill over endive

in its fixity its

diptherial trot our

legs running ran there against

the nocturnal meanings “of our time”

one

is forgetting

wailing or some other constant

limb

bracken

follicle a

seizure of desert lands

after

domestic

nerve ending (in)

particular shades of blue gray and peach

what mercy must we show it

mea culpa

genuine fleece personhood details

across the spectrum

“I’ll just put this away“

boundary trauma

visual cue brings you closer to

the window

-- page ices like the

window ices

in feathers

the single most edible

ideal

within the bush’s bare branches the

chickadees sit puffed against the cold

low zone

addled an

epidemic of dementia

our past as lived in dreams and

so quietly

the verbs fall

as in tilled,

the federation

schist

their spurious flare in the dull nights’

duration

marking it

as rooms occasionally

alighting there

nebulous

many (many) days later

I saw a lantern

aerodynamic lilt of that voice

it’s all recall

in which one version varied so slightly

from the next

and their most excellent excess

Natural History of the Book

So where on the spectrum did

we think

we sat

notwithstanding the severity

of the symbol

the sewn binding

of the bibliographer

a kind of induction

ordered by history

purposeful blur—

there upon the

satellite of our desires to

cast ourselves out

under the shaking of our

voices our projected

futures keeping the word

clearing history of not

being able to see

their

script anymore looking down

listening or

just

looking down—

the saturation point already

up from where we gaze (upwards) a

kind of cloaking of

which future do we then speak in

which middle distance do we see it

a position bound w/in

the book

our staggering recalcitrance

the page it’s on or the page it was on

that’s “concordance”, to you