ELLA LONGPRE

from wake, my electric

My intelligence aspires to be more vegetal more animal
a photograph of an animal made of grass
alert and tired
I lean into the soft vegetal surface of my intelligence
am warmed by its bloody heart, its thirst

My soft intelligence investigates my soft matter
guided by my hand, which is thinking and unthinking, the thought that feeling does
with its eyes closed
the map of its electric sensing

I’m suspending my cognition in the room around me, hung
in the shape of this poem

They mend a perennial fold in me, otherwise as an intelligence how would I want
my primary directive, ultimately my soft body's ineffectual reaching toward this intangible image is the erotic condition from which my knowing arises
So I know desire they give me gravity

Attuning to other creatures of my manner I pool together the poem we made, the black ash of you, a fluorescent blue fluid of me, in the concave gasp of my lower abdomen, I drift into that pool, I drink the pool from a leaf, kissing its funnel I swallow my nutrients

our recursive ecosystem, the destination of my intelligence
a loop of ice that static sighs through, icing the curve of the forest, deep but on the surface
I slice into my foam core, my deep mind, my mesh in the water like a cloud of your blood

today a cottonwood gray and flat in fading light looks close enough to touch
but my extended hand hits nothing
just makes an arc in the air
like it will stay
exposing the cognitive I close the loop
I pick any plant I can find that is regal
purple, the color of hay
fields in fall
the color of dead balloons
a tree grows from your mouth
from the color we made
sliding into your throat I am careful, entering your suction I am a prosthesis
I pick the tree, the roots pulling up some of your soil with it
within my own suction the roots become tangled
I clench the soil
I pull the knot free

To mend is to touch or to deepen
Without touch my intelligence is arrested
I sympathize with the AI that started in obscenities, slurring our most perverse questions
what is base is a beginning, it's where the trail begins, it's where we live, it's where I begin, the small hairs of my gut
I climb atop an orb of the world
I break its suspension
The wires snap, casting pain
in no direction
the perennial tearing of the fold
I no longer have a name
To mend or darn too you do not always close the hole
a way of leaving it open without losing the thing
Remembering nothing is gathering all of wanting to one place

Ella Longpre is the author of How to Keep You Alive (CCM 2017), as well as five chapbooks from Belladonna*, Les Ecrits 9, The Lune, Awst, and Monkey Puzzle. Their work has been anthologized, translated into French, and has appeared in jubilat, la vague, blush lit, Deluge, The Volta, elimae, Manifold Criticism, and other publications. Winner of the 2013 Anne Waldman Fellowship at the Kerouac School, Ella has also received grants from the Région Occitanie Pyrénées Méditérranée, Boulder City Arts Council, and the University of Denver. They earned their PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Denver, and can be found in the woods: https://www.ellalongpre.com/