A series of poems in collaboration with@Horse_ebooks. About. Buy.
I wrote a guest post over at the excellent Banango Lit about No Experiences. Maybe you would like to read it!BY: ERIN WATSON
Hello Banango! I’m Erin Watson, a poet in Chicago. I wrote a chapbook called No Experiences with one Horse_ebooks tweet in every poem. Here is how and why it happened.
What is a poem, after all? you say.
Maybe it is a kind of possessing
a heap of rocks, a buoy or anything —
A way to be the water, marking time
with ebbs at moonrise, or high tides.
An aperture to document these wild days
and seal the light away for other eyes.
Call it in the air.
Let something be misplaced.
Released elsewhere, a vapor,
ungathered steam.
A car rolls, flips into the air
and gyrates at tremendous speed.
We are amazed when we see the driver crawl
Swimming graceless across glistening asphalt
to safety, a refuse-strewn shoulder.
We choose these careful words.
Always it’s hardest to pry
open the ragged edges,
well-guarded seams between selves.
We jiggle a little ovation of keys,
entering independently some homes
tidy and unrecognizable in
a game of numbing skin, the body
afloat, unknown to itself.
If the light goes on
or the piston expands,
then the wheel turns.
If the light goes on
or the wheel turns,
then the wheel turns.
And when the world goes on without end,
then the wheel turns.
And let us sing that verse again.
Then the wheel turns.
Within a wheel, the ratcheting
sound of roulette,
lotteries, a movie-soundtrack
patter of suspense, a spin,
a part of speech, tapping pencils,
a daily double deal.
Relentless in harvesting
to rot. Implacable; a singular stampede.
Waiting on an automaton,
an oracle enough, one
like the tarot once read
with bruised legs splayed
on fake parquet floor.
A room done in green and
what’s lonely in familiar voices.
I was the Queen of Wands.
In this only world today—
Young people aren’t being taught
the right words to even ask
the right questions.
The weft of the world pulled back
that night to be
slackened and unorderly
So questions left me. Lost in noise
of fortunes and recordings
copied and corrupted,
beyond language.
♞
My idea of red
I obtain from
vermilion, minium
sealing-wax
wafers, a soldier’s
uniform,
Sinister eyeballs in
animation cels,
blackbirds’ wings,
fingernails in
glossy magazines.
Disruption, suddenness,
caesuras or case
studies of some harm.
A certain person
speaking stentorian
in an enraptured room.
From days of not talking, you may
feel a space open, an unclosed
parenthesis. Begin a fantasy narration:
She found the shoes, stared at them,
slowly put them on, taking her time,
and became young. (Oh, fantastic!
A brightening, the After scene
in a detergent advertisement.)
A grey hair recedes into its follicle.
On the precipice of sensation,
turning back,
(a shadow horror-playing on the wall)
to favor simulated things.
Someone will always be 25,
Stumbling towards their own
apotheosis of that age.
Somewhere it’s always a wakeful 3 a.m.
to race against the too soon rising sun.
Somehow hours stretch out to be spent
in wish fulfillment,
150,000 dreams.
Something will always be
raised up loudly to condemn
as a generation’s metonym.
Someday we’ll all forget together
how to speak of unsold things.
And so the voice unfolds in unowned time:
Truth is often shameless, truth is not shy.
Truth can be murderously horrible.
Maija. (Reluctantly.) The searchers
raise their unclean instruments.
Truth is silent, seething, darkened skies.
Truth will find nourishment in constancy,
Turning rows of earth with ancient plows.
