Katie Farris

the one lasting remnant of me-you-we
is nothing. But I have named it, so we are safe,

are safe. All is at peace and the saviors
scream so Christ is rising and

I take my chances, light another
for his memory. I inhale his body

and feel so alive, today is cracking
like a golden egg. For only a while

in the light I stand once again and no one
can notice the absence of sunrise.

In the glass of a window
there are etched words. I write to my past

until it becomes the air.

             *

Each morning this week alone, I burn
the light out, the sky is so bright that way.

  Now the fire has begun to burn down
    gently burning sounds like laundry in the wind
      but the sound is white, pure white, the blindness

which scalds when set
                             free.

Call me as the lonely keening cock
      calls the evening,
call me the space between two merging bodies.

a second skin
            around my ankles
                        falls softly you've lost the
              meaning of the curves and lines whisper

                    your mind is on a ride
                    with mine.

      I will drag an intensely personal narrative
      into the world and strip myself rare and raw
                        and rave.

      I wanted your truth to be my truth your truth
my body.

            wasting the precious night-time hours
              repeating these lines over and over until
                they made some semblance of a face.
                  So don't give me those                               words.
                                And don't accept
                                  mine but find wet laundry
                           fires.
              The cock is crowing, it
              is keening, the cock keens
              because grief
              is not a words, not.

Make for me a bow of cracked light and
                     I give you my word that
                        which I can
                     hold between two thumbs.
     I want to shoot like some
   Ejaculation (from
the impotent keening cock,
                   no less) or words.
      What to do
       when I begin to
            fill up? I feel
                  in my belly the
         happy fire of being.
            As I contemplate the
            contemplative rhythms of
             fingers tracing lines
             up my back the
skin turns pink then back to
white;
            Fire to tongue, tongue to fire
              but have traced me, are
         still warm, the undersides of my
           breasts still warm.

             Long pages of eloquence on
             the subject of bodies merging.

             *

It is nothingness that I
take and give to you, love

some answers, some sphinx on
the other side of me or

waves of pages. Each morning
this week alone, I burn

the light out, the sky
is so bright that way. What is there

for me to see or say?
I can open my mouth as far as it can go

and nothing will come out because this is a vision.
And people will offer me words, and that is my

comfort.

In Posse: Potentially, might be ...