Three Poems
Harem
I live in endless theorem. I live relentless correction. You didn’t tell me that we could sell the art: fiscal touching, fiscal touching in the courtyard. It elicits a response. Looking around the house peeling the wallpaper off, all so salable. Watch Pawn Stars and sleep. It seems that death is very possible. I have a million corporeal feelings. I live peerless. Here-less and There-less. Here, this: before it’s all gone we should touch the walls, illicit. Before I gray my hair. Before I marble statue. Not goodbye but see you later.
Harem Renaissance
Oh, to be born again a group of women, calling out in unison some geometry. Capital encapsulates my ribcage: a wealth of softness capping-off the tiny bird cage. My subcutaneous finches have a facility with correction. They subsume me, in fact. I wanted to be peerless. Instead, my marbles are gone uncounted. All that’s left is breasts.
Only Breast High
who are multiples, a theorem expressing a soft
articulation of voices, spaces surrounded
by brisk flattery against the skin.
you who shatter into discord and genital
conflagration, a misconception, or was it
only love.
we who throw sticks, eat stones and feel
like walls cluttered with roses, painted, peeling
repetition of waving and loss.
meaning wealth accumulates like limbs
slick and slippery, the erosion of monotonous
multiplied by too many fingers to count.
meaning at the edge of city, we accumulate
brush and stroke an emergency of correspondence
tidal wave of concrete sentiments.
Jill Darling lives in Ypsilanti, MI. She has had two poetry collections published: Solve For (BlazeVOX, ebooks) and begin with may: a series of moments (Finishing Line Press). Her manuscript, A Geography of Syntax, was recently chosen as a finalist for the Omnidawn Poetry Prize, and she’s had poems and creative essays published in literary journals including /NOR, Aufgabe, 580 Split, Quarter After Eight, Upstairs at Duroc, and Phoebe, and forthcoming in Horse Less Review and Denver Quarterly. She also has an MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University and a Ph.D. in Twentieth Century American Literature and Culture from Wayne State University, and currently teaches at Eastern Michigan University and The University of Michigan-Dearborn.
Hannah Ensor is from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and received her MFA in poetry at the University of Arizona. She has poems in Bat City Review, Cutbank, Spork Press & Apartment Poetry among others. Along with being a member of the deep-ocean noise-pop duo Algae & Tentacles, she is also a co-editor of textsound.org, an assistant poetry editor for DIAGRAM, and serves as vice president of the board of directors of Casa Libre en la Solana, a literary arts nonprofit in Tucson, Arizona.
Laura Wetherington’s first book, A Map Predetermined and Chance (Fence Books 2011), was selected by C.S. Giscombe for the National Poetry Series. She has two chapbooks: Dick Erasures (Red Ceilings Press) and a collaboration with Jill Darling and Hannah Ensor, at the intersection of 3 (Dancing Girl Press 2014). Her work has appeared in the Minnesota Review, Drunken Boat, and The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare edited by Paul Legault and Sharmila Cohen (Nightboat Books). Laura teaches at Sierra Nevada College and co-edits textsound.org.