Alchemy; Eclipsed with Disrespect for Galileo Galilei; Elliptical
- Cathexis Northwest Press
- Jan 1, 2020
- 1 min read
By: Anders Howerton
Alchemy
I am not listening
to anything
but the woman
plucking cans
from an idea of treasure.
Her fingers rain
sands of trash alum.
Later, she will bottle-nurse
a wild dog.
She won’t ever
put it down.
She‘d rather let it go out
to die of domesticity.
The cuspid puncture
brushes the subcutis;
she lets it taste blood,
lets it scream in the night
like a flock
of what I want:
to hear the being ricochet —
ingot made of body.
Eclipsed with Disrespect for Galileo Galilei
We cast our motions misconceived
like spilled emotions to the place
from which our bones were thrown.
You are the kiln, fixed body,
yet we draw your quotient
falling, setting, rising,
going down. Stationary sphere,
you stand and burn, casting spears
in our direction.
We spin repeatedly around
and measure bony notions
in these bodies of convection.
Shadows of a rope swing swaying
(you’re staying and going)
or spilling from a tipping bell –
you sit synthesized
and stellar still. In darkness
we are soothed. Drawing motions,
drawings move: falling, falling, fell.
Elliptical
She orbits imbalanced, her axis tilted like a houseplant too long unturned toward the heat and light; every day of every revolution her face grows arid in places. She watches from satellites as her sands slip and her strata tabulate, calls her body's unused fuel sections of death, this bitumen. She relies on momentum, unperturbed curves, union set in motion by a ratio of tension. She is of two lights; the gaseous and the other's gibbous heart tautly bind her foci pole to pole.
Anders Howerton lives and works in Oakland, California. He has a Master's in Poetry from the University of East Anglia.
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