4. Are you so sure we can move freely in space : somewhere behind me, on the periphery, at the
bar : while M’s work is read, by
others as it forever will be : they were tucked in, recessed : was it fear :
what a thought : I forgot I’d write about them : not too much : the emcee said
to read any length of time, drink this : what cost tribute : I met her partner,
I thought it was her partner : I’d seen images on her wall many times : many
seemed to involve homemade pie : how context expands dimensionality, but the
room was small : shut down now, two years later, another victim : outside D mentioned them while catching a car :
I am not one to ask, I said : then told her : they fade into the background,
shadow cast on a surface, a body intercepting light :
7. It’s a mistake to do things too
easily : two days after, we collectively resorted to some form of normal,
posts about dinner, cats : but her final messages continued surfacing :
pictures of leaves ask to be identified : then dead again : I mean, still :
lava lake rising, overflowed the crater floor : had a stroke then suddenly :
“When I eat bread, I feel really sad” : eating pizza on an island made me miss
the city more : I didn’t write much but M
was : ruptured, just days ago in Hawaii, I saw pictures : then the volcano :
boiled away, water : what’s the name of that museum in the hills : I began to
collapse things : I didn’t know what happened : while magma drained away,
underground to the middle, a series of earthquakes :
12. The night came like a turning of the
lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow : a year ago in my childhood
bedroom, nightly binged episodes of Crazy
Ex Girlfriend : driven to devise a mechanism for distraction : to manage
what drove us to doom: an introduction : or a modern minstrel show when they
were too tired to dance : now my stomach just hurts every night : when I was
unable to find my terminal, ran out of the airport and had to Lyft home : then
woke because like death, can’t miss your flight : dreaming :
23. For after the battle comes quiet
: people who have experienced extreme weather events can’t practice projection
: “Can you believe one body had so many guns on it” : don’t shoot the storm, I
cried : because it was here, well, in Florida, downgraded : and another one
coming : G and V or was it K and F : what happens when we run out of
names : almost everything was dead but three plants bloomed : mint and I don’t
remember the other two : the hurricane’s path now wider than the state itself :
meanwhile I flew back into smoke, smell of ash permeating flight : but this was
another season, when we could still fly :
33. But we forgot that planets must
ultimately fall back one by one into the parent body : someone carried bags
of glass bottles : how much can we take in, take on : I scanned diaries for
exploding stars : small pinpricks of light require less bandwidth : another
form of escapism : a mystery minus the murder, hoodies : but there’s always a
monster, as they put it : was this a test, a trial played out online across
media : screenshots weaponized : what they hoped to reveal : was this bragging
: cruelty is not a literary experiment : to displace by floating, submerging
another : mother body : then pretend to own it : I feigned fault while they
extracted words to repurpose : to be clear, could be clever : the lengths we’ll
go for a supernova :
Valerie Witte
is the author of a game of correspondence (Black Radish, 2015) and The
Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (Operating System, 2019),
co-written with Sarah Rosenthal. Chapbooks include The history of mining
(g.e. collective/Poetry Flash, 2013) and It’s been a long time since I’ve
dreamt of someone (Dancing Girl Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in
literary journals such as VOLT, Diagram, Dusie, Alice
Blue, Interim, and elsewhere. She has attended residencies through
The Hambidge Center, Ragdale Foundation, and La Porte Peinte in Noyers, France.
She is a founding member of the Bay Area Correspondence School.