George Kalamaras
ON THE WAY OUT OF THE BODY
First, on the way out of the body, look back upon small talk as a host enthusiasm.
Ask every severe wish be granted at the lamasery in Kounbourn.
The following day, we devoted every detail to eating precisely half a carrot.
If you eat it, the monk had said, it will no longer be just half.
Every day passed like snowed-in shepherd pace.
We dispatched modest papers, but who forgot the precaution of a fixed ceremony, and where were the lambs?
I began to contemplate the periodic use of commas.
I assumed the necessity to pause, over and again, like inhabiting new bodies, birth to birth.
If rhetoric instigates the ulceration of canker sores, then speak to me melodically, but only when I eat.
Remember, it’s alright to precipitate yourself in the name of a sudden seize of rain.
By which I mean that the trail, without snowshoes, was long.
By which I mean, in the body or out, we hunt for questions and exclamations.
OUR SMALLEST, MOST TENDER SELVES
Given the exactitude of the knife, I might kneel as moonlight does in the pygmy possum’s ear.
The brain of the fire ant is extraordinarily complex for such a tiny organ.
Hear my treed self singe? My marsupial-my? My how-can-this-be?
I am beside myself with the threat of finally growing up into this thing called forgiveness.
Without apparent discomfort, we become friends across the Gobi of the chest.
We might be dust mites together, absorbing oily secretions from one another’s words.
Under a wide range of circumstances, we might be alive.
We might sweeten the human taste, collect star charts from the chest cavity of a moldering crow.
The edge of the road is very near a great response.
Enormous depth is wherever we look out and see further inside than ever before.
THE DIPLOMACY OF APPLES
Dormer windows slowly assume any possibility of light.
Thousands of stars in my body give the appearance of a peony-bent dawn rain.
So, I’ve decided to strain my life toward the sound of moist for less?
So, a long time from now I might pick sea lice from the pouch of badger blood and
remove the fishhook from my childhurt ear?
The time to love could be the world.
Multiple discourses collide, like philosophies of rain.
I realize I come from the sound of worms scraping across the diplomacy of an apple.
What awful, what pain we release just through proximity and wrath.
Treaties were signed. Treaties were broken.
Hanging from the dawn-breaking tree outside my window, incantations of not-quite
bandit bloat blur the bathroom mirror with the feed-sack strain of my name.
SCAR-LIGHT
There is little doubt that I am constituted of scar-light carried in the astral spine, like torn tissue, birth to birth.
She wore green gaspeite set in silver, discovered in Australia when mining for something else entirely.
I could be a hushed bastard, and sort of was, wandering decades through the Urals
and Carpathians, searching for my father in wolf scat and dens.
Then I found the unusual small influence of the phrase, So say I unto our mouth.
When pretending to be a dagger, it is important to hide in the stew until the last possible moment.
The psychoanalysis of an egg has been shown to expose a dignified filth.
Who is ultimately in the best position to be a dog?
On what sofa might we sleep? And what deep twitching would we dream?
DEATH OF DEATH THE
Say it fast, and you’ll sense breath go out of the breath.
Say it backwards, and death of death the makes little sense.
It was agreed upon that we would share the thikana—our common abode—dividing up
the Indian feudal state accordingly.
Heaven adopted earth, and earth adopted actual words.
They arranged themselves on paper and called me Grandfather Rose.
I referred to them tenderly as, Be still, my child.
You are sick and tired of all my talk?
You wish I’d fall through all that sad and emerge never again to speak?
The frustration the furnace feels with the summer is more than competition.
The one-upmanship of a garter on fire in the man’s mouth says, No need to bring me
hose—I’m perfectly content in the cage of my craving?
All right. I’ll confess. It wasn’t the exposed water pipe, after the plumber knocked out the wall, that got me.
It wasn’t my grandfather’s calendar of naked women that I, compulsively, loved to stare
into when I was only five.
Something is always bending toward me, full of unquiet milk.
I used to think it was the pouch of a marsupial wolf, or a worm farm from Tasmania on fire.
First, on the way out of the body, look back upon small talk as a host enthusiasm.
Ask every severe wish be granted at the lamasery in Kounbourn.
The following day, we devoted every detail to eating precisely half a carrot.
If you eat it, the monk had said, it will no longer be just half.
Every day passed like snowed-in shepherd pace.
We dispatched modest papers, but who forgot the precaution of a fixed ceremony, and where were the lambs?
I began to contemplate the periodic use of commas.
I assumed the necessity to pause, over and again, like inhabiting new bodies, birth to birth.
If rhetoric instigates the ulceration of canker sores, then speak to me melodically, but only when I eat.
Remember, it’s alright to precipitate yourself in the name of a sudden seize of rain.
By which I mean that the trail, without snowshoes, was long.
By which I mean, in the body or out, we hunt for questions and exclamations.
OUR SMALLEST, MOST TENDER SELVES
Given the exactitude of the knife, I might kneel as moonlight does in the pygmy possum’s ear.
The brain of the fire ant is extraordinarily complex for such a tiny organ.
Hear my treed self singe? My marsupial-my? My how-can-this-be?
I am beside myself with the threat of finally growing up into this thing called forgiveness.
Without apparent discomfort, we become friends across the Gobi of the chest.
We might be dust mites together, absorbing oily secretions from one another’s words.
Under a wide range of circumstances, we might be alive.
We might sweeten the human taste, collect star charts from the chest cavity of a moldering crow.
The edge of the road is very near a great response.
Enormous depth is wherever we look out and see further inside than ever before.
THE DIPLOMACY OF APPLES
Dormer windows slowly assume any possibility of light.
Thousands of stars in my body give the appearance of a peony-bent dawn rain.
So, I’ve decided to strain my life toward the sound of moist for less?
So, a long time from now I might pick sea lice from the pouch of badger blood and
remove the fishhook from my childhurt ear?
The time to love could be the world.
Multiple discourses collide, like philosophies of rain.
I realize I come from the sound of worms scraping across the diplomacy of an apple.
What awful, what pain we release just through proximity and wrath.
Treaties were signed. Treaties were broken.
Hanging from the dawn-breaking tree outside my window, incantations of not-quite
bandit bloat blur the bathroom mirror with the feed-sack strain of my name.
SCAR-LIGHT
There is little doubt that I am constituted of scar-light carried in the astral spine, like torn tissue, birth to birth.
She wore green gaspeite set in silver, discovered in Australia when mining for something else entirely.
I could be a hushed bastard, and sort of was, wandering decades through the Urals
and Carpathians, searching for my father in wolf scat and dens.
Then I found the unusual small influence of the phrase, So say I unto our mouth.
When pretending to be a dagger, it is important to hide in the stew until the last possible moment.
The psychoanalysis of an egg has been shown to expose a dignified filth.
Who is ultimately in the best position to be a dog?
On what sofa might we sleep? And what deep twitching would we dream?
DEATH OF DEATH THE
Say it fast, and you’ll sense breath go out of the breath.
Say it backwards, and death of death the makes little sense.
It was agreed upon that we would share the thikana—our common abode—dividing up
the Indian feudal state accordingly.
Heaven adopted earth, and earth adopted actual words.
They arranged themselves on paper and called me Grandfather Rose.
I referred to them tenderly as, Be still, my child.
You are sick and tired of all my talk?
You wish I’d fall through all that sad and emerge never again to speak?
The frustration the furnace feels with the summer is more than competition.
The one-upmanship of a garter on fire in the man’s mouth says, No need to bring me
hose—I’m perfectly content in the cage of my craving?
All right. I’ll confess. It wasn’t the exposed water pipe, after the plumber knocked out the wall, that got me.
It wasn’t my grandfather’s calendar of naked women that I, compulsively, loved to stare
into when I was only five.
Something is always bending toward me, full of unquiet milk.
I used to think it was the pouch of a marsupial wolf, or a worm farm from Tasmania on fire.