The Someone is the I, I Told Them
by Joseph Cooper*
The little past I know lingers in
artless glass
bottles – lost in rows
and thought –
now breaks
in a way
to remember you by.
Frantically, like some dreams do. Say
how this body is an effigy scarcely burning
its bed sheets in another
altogether mirrored silence: I think
his mouth is a threshold of shelves
that looks, observes and engages me a while
searching for that magic of mimicry. Like
when I consider the junkyard, the postcard tornado
and its mean, loving activism
I can go on believing in a place, in the inter-
position of pills rattling, hitting
separately in this twisted abyss.
The name is a form of city
no
longer
building on the act of ground
yet not yet
certain like a line is—
writing on you to reconstitute
a cupboard of terrible loves
and the dark miracles ending
in audience.
*from Arias Let Into, “while searching frantically for pills in the mirrored cupboard rattling rows of bottles on its little glass shelves”
Travis Macdonald is the author of two full-length books of procedural poetry – The O Mission Repo[vol.1] (an erasure of The 9/11 Commission Report) and N7ostradamus (an Oulipian treatment of Nostradamus’ quatrains) – as well as several chapbooks. In his spare time, he co-edits Fact-Simile Editions with his wife JenMarie. In 2014, Travis was the recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. He is happy to be here with you.
