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C.N.P Poetry 

The Stutter; Beautiful Enough Alone

Writer's picture: Cathexis Northwest PressCathexis Northwest Press

By: L. Kamali‘i Ferguson



The Stutter


When the lights of houses have become a life The wire spine and the seed-pods chime What’s your name? echoes the kissing ivy on her shoulders a light left dwindling moonlight What’s your name? My hand on the small guilts two hands at his belly thunder there between his knees each arm rose like starlit where fish-bellies conjured the real thing jeweled in blood in a bog sinking painted as with words dripping cold look, that was lost rose-hips falling through damp leaves blowing up sparks Erasure of Singing School by Seamus Heaney







Beautiful Enough Alone


Loss is particular. The luminous clarity of a woodpecker probing the black birch— falling undivided light This blackberry elegy to the thin wire of love. I remember holding a thirst; we hardly had to say: the way hands dismantle the body is numinous. Erasure of Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass




 

L. Kamali‘i Ferguson grew up on the island of Maui. She currently works as an independent consultant supporting the development of collaborative, consent-based governance systems for social change efforts nationally. She is in the end stages of a terminal degree in public health and expects to receive her Doctor of Public Health degree in the spring of 2021. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.


"My erasure project was inspired by David Dodd Lee’s books of Ashbury Erasure poems. I was so blown away by them, I erased over 100 poems in three months. I found that I loved the violence of it—hacking away. I’m the Dexter of erasure, I thought. My favorite poet to erase is Seamus Heaney. I don’t think I need to explain why. If you love his poems, you know. If you hate them, you know. Anyway, the point is that after all of that destruction what emerged was my own unfettered-ness. I learned that there are always too many words at first and that I have a tendency to reject or question the ineffable stuff that surfaces like the slow shadow of a whale keeping pace with my clipper ship. What’s under the surface thrills and terrifies me. In this case, The Stutter and Beautiful Enough Alone are distillations of the poems as filtered through my subconscious. I worked to not think too much. To just let them happen to me. "





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