The glut of paintings. The glut. The paintings.
Author: David Greenspan
David Greenspan is the author of One Person Holds So Much Silence (Driftwood Press). He’s a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi and earned an MFA from UMass Amherst. His poems have appeared in places like Bellevue Literary Review, DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Narrative, and West Branch.
NSWD 12
Imprecise light of elementary school. Dirt outside worked over, a hallway of sorts. Smell of cheap acrylic paint dying in a classroom. Accumulated smell moving the afternoon’s equation.
NSWD 11
You may be granted while washing your spit a moment out of time. Memory, that spiraling pleasure, knows neither time nor its passage, not even its halt. Memory is of curse error. Not much more needs to to be said on that subject.
NSWD 10
Watch your spit, longing
again for the safety of a carcassed mouth,
slide lower and louder. Name the colors
scene in the mirror. Off white, bubble
of sliver, cream, pastel
trail along its surface.
NSWD 9
Another experience of time. Spit twice
on a mirror without looking. Move your eyes
once finished expelling water.
Do not under any circumstance pay
attention, under any circumstance, to the mirror,
its frame, under any, or anything,
circumstance, in the reflection, under.
NSWD 7
Restless becoming in the passage of time,
taken from a translation by Ken Knabb,
found online during wither. The original
taking, Debord’s moment of aperture,
of molded polymer and wire and, was
itself from a translation, though I can’t speak
to its quality, its who or where,
when was likely the early 1960s.
NSWD 14
Decadence
Translating some gauze thought, gauze like rough paper, translating
rough thought like gauze paper. That’s not an abbreviation. Stand
before a crone’s chicken legged hut in winter, become
some abbreviation for walnut and tongue. We tried
diplomacy with the water, the ivy, the spoonful of humus left
in place of an immune system. We are systems these days, these alarming
minutes between breaths. Doctor eat your heart out. Doctors eat
what comes after. We tried water with the ivy, diplomacy with the humus,
winter with alarms. We tried systems. We tried bleaching
coral and body parts. Decadence implies what comes after. Translating this
pain in my right thigh I record hundreds of hours of voice memos
between the winter I lose handwriting and the hour I lose
bleaching. The voice is a system, remove one letter and the vice
abbreviates. We crack walnuts, mutter without tongues, gather
hours of hundreds of voice memos. Write them out by hand,
by gauzed winter light, water blue and humming. Listen. Between tongues
doctors stitch together, between abbreviations and years, there in the paper
spoonful, there between immune systems, there a chicken sitting on a pillow
in translation, there a thigh, leg, vice, several voices, there between
hut and window, another name for space, for air. Listen. I may be guilty.
That’s all. We may all be guilty. That’s a system. Some selenite to clean
what otherwise remains nameless. Check before we gauze
diplomacy. Bleach the selenite to name what otherwise remains
clean. There’s no such thing, I say to Ryan Uellendahl, today’s soured
ivy. Hundreds of hours of unread minutes, translated to failing immune
systems, failing translated pain. It’s the winter, the bleached
doctors. Call after, eat water, and so on. I will not go back to New York.
NSWD 15
An Act of Composites
Something said about the selfish quality of light.
Study our kidneys most animal. Also lichen,
child of algae and fungus, marginal and kind. Oh to be
primitive of throat like salmon, to open
our mouths and show pink all the way down. Edges
muddy, we become the commodity form’s new marrow.
I admit I am more guilt than pollen.
Mother the saying we will get paid and carry a mouth of figs.
Why these teeth? Why not, we ask,
breath full of incubation and other misfortune.
The time between exposure and development
spent learning to clean chicken liver.
Forget the bloat of yogurt after days of not
eating. Speech bubbles
sprout, petal, begin their clot as we shiver
new uses for water.
Residents in the Ward of If We Can’t Live as Human,
We’ll Live as Syllable. Join us
umbilical and diapered in celebration
of cruelty, of signs which don’t read
we buy horses. All
pharmacies smell the same.
NSWD 27
Acknowledgments
“Begin with error,” first appeared in Sleepingfish.
“An Act of Composites” first appeared in Action, Spectacle.
“Decadance” is forthcoming in Fence.
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NSWD 16
Failure
I wear sheets fitted smart around the neck. The partially winged jay can’t help but circle in the dirt. I spear my hand into water for the bright release.