CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive
Anne Marie Rooney
Villanelle: Wilder
Can isolation make a person go blind. Go animal. Being blind can make the animal
go red. But what red. Blue is in
its stasis a quiet one-windowed room. Though a claw can grow from this color can
a throat. Can isolation make a person go blind. Go animal.
Can it throat the deeply stuttered a new blood, even or blackly uddered. Being milk
in the mouth can dull what red blue is in
but will it. While a tooth extends its empty into ache. Or sadness thickens its stitches.
And can isolation make a person. Go blind. Go animal
if you don’t believe the tongue knows it’s quicker. I’ve learned to fit the temper to its
truth: what’s red, blue is in.
In that moorless water. Scratch that crawls back to slacker. Go home if you
would can isolation. Make a person go blind, go animal
if you would. Would the i-less house slant back if it could. Can you see what I’m
getting at, what’s really red. Blue is in
this too: two blanks, and a wall, and don’t mind the sunken din. Can isolation make a
person go blind, go animal, what red blue is in.
Sad Fruit with Poem in Its Middle
You go to such wordlorn lengths. Should I break them generously
or otherwise acquit
The station from its tracks, its record. It’s painful
to watch
The smoke fill and unfill your one lung, a contract
constricted by
Long lunges of hot air. I will follow your ass, but where
to travel when
Every there inflates with bruising, the bricks of other thrills
and sour
Sources of your fevered stash. Hear: the life you lead
is dumpy. Impeded.
An apple’s thoughtless waxing, that which enters everything, means
nothing. You are
some tall hat in that weather. Wet, empty, standing upright
as candy.
That forthright, impolitic. That sad tree with its hand up its
skirt.
Blind Side: Index of First Lines
A round of looks undusts the brow
Across just one room a trail burns
All one can do is show the lapse of time
Anything I feel is cut out of the pasture
Because of suspension, each hook breaking hold
Blankets escape into the canvas’s real
Does intimacy demand effacement? Scrub
Each triad of angles into which light
Ghost strains dilate the traveling across
How far heat’s affect is from the gloss
I figure
Innocuous figure
Land excapes its silver barb
Leach of shadow across the boxy ghost
Light performs on the wall
Light taints the blanket of light
Move back against the wall to be a block
One trail: the room burns
Out in the land also has no signature
Paint and its interval squeeze
Shadow cancers appear. Dislocate back
Shock stops fire like the village burning stops
Signature of vision despite being tremendous
Slur of being shot
Such that binds will pass through this and carry nothing
The canvas is real
The performance of capture in each field
There is no intervention in
Trauma of distance from me
Water escapes the burning village
Water was the effacement in the air
Windows ruined themselves against the day
You can’t slice the travel
You want to wear the trace and will
Your image trains
Anne Marie Rooney is the author of Spitshine (Carnegie Mellon University Press) and The Buff (The Cupboard). Her writing has appeared in the Best New Poets and Best American Poetry anthologies. A native New Yorker, she currently lives in New Orleans, where she is a teaching artist.
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