LOUISE AKERS
you are ready for a hot summer
you are ready for a hot summer.
you can bear it
without talent, with heroic i can
pirate miles of
badroad, rim, and air.
youare making everybody
dangerous,
like waterbirds do: person-
able stamina in
personal control.
we swung:
foci of your longing
orbit swung;
we
swung the great
realities: your
hot, hot, hot.
we swung
the eiders,
tolled our war
metabolism. i
remember,
says the door, for i was always,
i was always
violent.
summer: everybody
hates
the tolldown, we
the gullswung, down your fish take--
you or we--
you should be ready
quickly.
sealevel
she says by february everyone
will be important.
i wonder whether everything
is concomitant of duration: poly-
amory as time condensed,
hedonia as time released, and
dulse as time of season, northern seas.
i follow toward the water with the drift
wood to conduct
an isoline for
finding /how best to
abrade
the flat sand /
i could conceive of anything without
her.
i could break the hull, again, i
pull a brake like convex grazed. i hate
to presuppose a tern
/the wake, like nothing
is inside of her.
she says may insists on function:
curves of /gentleness in
slopes. i’m mortified
by my resilience-- how
my constant won’t adjust to hers. our
mothers wintered well
alright; she
hasn’t read my summer chart.
genius
her carryon is a tent
/a seamless equivalence; i
tell her i’m hairpony for the show.
--
sometimes she laughs so hard she wakes the fjord.
--
from her point of view, i am a giant
a necessitybound fish.
--
i fix the courts that steam up into women,
massage away the thickest stars. i
want to draw her face with lots of other faces
on it.
--
the horses spread
under load, under the butcher
blocked world; what
is a metal lathe used? what do horses
do with other people’s streamers?
--
I would step on you I would bankrupt
you i might
make a moon my instinct tells me, shhh
keep quiet so her wrists can
calm the rain.
--
what wireless the bees and wasps
hold focus for the rain.
the sting
of bees, the payout
is a thick humidity, the overhead
is to be every dead thing.
she won’t let me wear the horses in my hair
despite the pouring
rain. i love her
relics/
her notation.
--
i watch the brain ease
inlet out of ocean turn
imbricated shore toward filial
indulgence.
i offer onces upon which to rest
her gaze.
she looks alone somehow;
i ask her once to
wave.
a wave
wilderness contends with envy.
she asks to cut my bangs.
oh, beautiful, oh, cattle! i shake myself clear. i condense into smallness.
i am outside trying to vomit
the freshness of recurrent
genesis.
she told me she could barely function, she kept
bumping into cattle, fluttering to mirrors, watching
selves and feeling others.
she said look there
is an squid in the belly of an eel. there is a school of smaller eels in the belly of an eel.
reaching up the throat is squid caught in the belly of an eel.
i am perfectly fearless.
oh, high desert home! i look for them: the west, the fine white filaments that tether
cattle to the other cattle,
mirrors.
i think it bothers her I’m the only one left.
she must be the one who stands there
waving
upto
me.
Louise Akers is a poet living in Brooklyn, NY. She earned her MFA from Brown University in May of 2018, and the Rosemary and Keith Waldrop Prize for Innovative Poetry in 2017.