Stephanie Young


I want to experience myself in this way


In my hands, a sense of total separation

A sense of near total immanence


*

This small solid collection of tissue, a botany

As a small mass of rounded or irregular shape, does

As a small abnormal knobby bodily protuberance, would

As a tumorous growth or a calcification is palpable (can be felt)

In the skin of patients will tell you

Buildings cut open, here they were

That index, too


*

Everything into the mouth

Icy Hot Recall

Lines written with friends

I mean, really

I want to eat everything         ?

Apparently so

With friendly accompaniment

Quick everything quick

Nothing

Doesn’t go into

All the air in the mouth couldn’t

All the poems, hair.doc, china.doc

Eating at the index of lowness

Really shoving it in

Pieces drop from the corner lip

Should be so lucky

Set in a scene in California

Table for four or six

Glasses, glass, reflective coating

Always being made an example of this window we’re standing in front of

The period’s problems

Done with pointing towards their arrival

Disparate, non-matching ‘eclectic’

Sense of total separation

Sense of near-total immanence


*

The most alive of all things is eating an egg

Eating two eggs

On a dead piece of toast


*

In short, these panties

Inexpensive, poorly pressed into shape

Neoliberal free trade panties

I can’t cease

Speaking of desire for a word that doesn’t even belong to me

In poetry—a word I don’t own

This resemblance to the cotton I’m inside of

Victor: she didn’t belong to you

The point is what the other character said

Nobody’s way of being lit-up between

Two slabs of time

Belongs to the person who thinks so

They didn’t say that

They said nobody’s life

In particular his, wrongly imprisoned

How can we start to think in this space

Of such range

Of not-belonging

I mean against ownership

Things one doesn’t own

When one can’t

Get your head right

When in the time of rats and mice

Of rats and possums

Attributable sound

That in the wall of longing for fabric

Spoken of in public

A trip to the shop for cheap panties

This dead longing

3-4 years of getting

Nothing done


*

Whistles through the gap between some front teeth

Or against the gums

The violence isn’t all around

It’s in me

A human index

A lack of knowledge

Someone find the

Here we are again

Here we go

Someone find

And show him


*

Wretched is a word it remembers suddenly


*

I think I have parsed it

But I have not become nothing

An empty iteration in the soap drama of all this fear

Toothsome waiting

Basically chocolate milk

The parcels it seemed to be making

Something we knew

Clung to the sides of the ship


*

I’m making a system for being alone with it


*

Index of failure, of human failure

Filter of index of human failure

One doesn’t set out to be

During this time I vow under the pressures to be with

Pounds per square inch per capita impact

Flooding the

Yet no kids, just a kind of intense presence

What Anne Boyer calls heroic composition

Extremity of duration under various influences

Paranoia, sore throat, networked communication

All the time remember gathering worms and leaves from between burgundy lava rocks
under the aspen trees

Doesn’t belong

Doesn’t belong to you


*

I want to experience myself in this way

The subject as she is observed

An analogue of the facsimile produced

As a city, from above

As seen by the space planner, urbanist, city planner or cartographer

A theoretical simulacrum

A picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of
practices

, like that

You’ve got to be kidding

“the voyeur-god created by this fiction, who, like Schreber’s God, knows only cadavers”

Yes that one


*

I hang a navy and purple sweater vest on a hanger over a white button-up shirt

Suspended from the front curtain rod where it can be observed from the prospective of a
yellow kitchen

The sweater cinched at the waist

The white button-up shirt with a decorative white stitch along the collar and cuffs, pink
ribbon inside the collar

Mass artisinal, as if anthropologie, with many buttons up the sleeve

Hang a short strand of pearls around the neck of the hanger, a long gold chain

A pendant suspended on the chain, a scene from England or France depicted there, a
woman and man

I don’t know, they’re not wearing wigs, the sleeves are mutton-ish

I think he is placing a necklace around her neck

Maybe he is a woman

Later I add a Saint Christopher medal to the same chain and stand back to observe

Holly Golightly

Ringo Starr

Christian Bale

Jessica Alba, when she travels

The Knight’s Yeoman

Veronica Mars

Seabiscuit

James Stewart as Charles Lindbergh

Many icon brand motorcycle jackets


*

Filter: I meant what doesn’t get through the mesh

The mesh itself

Underthings

I got it wrong

Ariana Reines, what she writes about the book as organ

Like that

But now the sound of a chlorinated pool is in this poem

Shaped like a kidney bean and other poems

The glunk of its motor

A kidney bean is shaped like a kidney

Leaves trapped in the filter

By filter I didn’t mean leave the leaves out

That is all I have to show for myself

They are


*

A person is just trying to get by and it shows

You mean the one and a half jobs

Oh we’re back there again, the lack

Time and training

About getting by

On the 1.5

Ounces

Cartons


*

I wanted to make some things

Visible to push things

Through the door

From one room to the next

I wanted membranes

I wanted to witness some things

Passing and pushing their faces

Against the membrane

The bio-film

The structured community of microorganisms

Encapsulated within a self-developed polymeric matrix

And adherent to a living or inert surface

The dish of it

The dishing

Bioflavanoids, too

And those were that

And those were this,

I am totally insistent

Little drawers of a cabinet

The punched cards that don’t come

As they are supposed to

Rolling along on wheels for instance

I don’t recall Jack Nicholson as easily as I should

When struggling to call up

Five Easy Pieces

To list in a comment box

To list, to the side

I wanted to clean the bathroom and did

Not come to any conclusions

I couldn’t think about

Or even look at those

Early sorry, sad and sorry

Attempts, I attempted to

Walk away wholesale from

The whole stinky venture

What do you call it

“I don’t recall”

Is a big lie

Lie of the community

That’s a lie, too

What’s true is I feel

Flayed, like Bobby Flay’s

Last name, burnt and grilled

And grilling meat before

You eat you lacerate

The food, right? Masticate it

Later, I wanted to

Want, I wanted


*

Nothing, though I walk,

Yea though I do

Through the shadow of yellow files

Miss you terribly

2006




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