I.
If the era of great castles has finally ended,*
where do we imagine ourselves hiding?
How was the eviction justified? With an image?
So it isn’t enough to glue some words on a page. Like the kale-flower in that daffodil vase. Like the kale-flower drops its kale-petals. Should I cook the kale-petals now that they’ve dropped. It was never a real flower. Don’t say that.
We believed in the power of communally generated energy explosions.
And we believed in the productive potential of the whirling magic-machine.
We were speaking of impossible possibilities and possible impossibilities,
and the flux that can permeate our whole reality if we let it – a raw fluidity in the touch
of a body in the feeling of a song in the body, open circuit of instinct and desire –
explode body, give birth body, destroy body, it is time for you to be with all the other bodies –
II.
A silent mermaid sits in a gallery crying glittery tears. A video of the sea plays on a television covered with sea-colored fabric. She hands each spectator a letter. Spectators can keep the letter, give it away, burn it, send it to sea.
Her skin is covered in lyrics. Her mouth is taped or bound with plastic wrap or tin foil. Sometimes she talks to spectators by gurgling in a bowl of water. She is writing a love letter, a mourning song for the sea, sewn together with fragments of the lost object.
She undoes her restraints and moves among the audience. She takes off her costume and the piece shifts into a meta-performance about a desperately sad girl who pretends she is a mermaid to work through her loss.
Here is a snake with a glass tongue.
She is beautiful.
When the snake speaks the glass darts out
in little shards, sparkling like dew.
The snake wants to share her glass
tongue, she will touch anything she can see.
III.
A swallowed object softly speaks the echo of its name.
The way we touch with the tips of our fingers.
*First line is from Tony Tost’s “An Emperor’s Nostalgia”
"Glass Tongued Snake" originally appeared in Datableed and is republished here with kind permission of the author.
The ALL Review is pleased to present our How to Live series, poems chosen to help readers navigate these difficult and rapidly changing times.
