In my arms many flowers

 

Rigidly construct box: hovel
for safe echo, brown noise.

To this hermitage we offer
chastity: water, ceremony.

Microchip lays claim, stranger
soldered to circuitry in copper, in copper.

*

See how we turn away from ourselves,
seeing each other as if for the last time.

Love unfastens, you fall out of it;
leave only salt, bones of stardust.

Want for an innocence, child beholden
to the parchment of breast, of breast.

*

Our parents have sold our country,
imaginationalism a youth so white.

Detached house, untouched whole,
its walls move into me like a cliff.

My poem dissolves in me like aspirin
and still and still my head, my head.

*

One-way mirror of the dream,
we sit before the ochre robe.

Ring the bell: Lagoon widens
at the conflux, rushes, rushes.

Hushes, hushes—how soft a stream,
algae all tortoiseshell, all tortoiseshell.
in my arms many flowers
in my arms many flowers

 

 

Tsanahėnė, from Memory Cycle in Spirit Language

for tanner menard

 

An alligator a bear a poet
Eyes flit like cardinals
Mantis universe
Compound arthropod bend a corpus

Reach out and touch it
Knows the way
Sings a magic song
Removes poison thick like diesel

Teaches sage and burns it
Rattles a rattle a gourd a shell
Abalone and oyster underfoot
Riddles a riddle of Śariputra

Wonderful this art
Woman man inside them
Writes your grey vibration
Writhes in submerged rainbows

How can I express this life
It is something I remembered
It is someone I knew before
Brother mother sister lover

 

 

 

 

 

O Mayeux (http://4f4d.xyz) is a linguist and artist based in Cambridge, England who writes in English and Louisiana Creole. His first collection, Artefacts, is forthcoming with the Post-Asemic Press.