The Poetry Project

excerpt from “Moveable C”

Alli Warren

As soon as I start to speak, the crippling caving

Unintentional day of silence

Poached milkweed, lavender cupping

They say the way out is deeper in but sometimes I wanna run

When the dead are laid in common earth, if there be light what the light might mean

What it designates versus what it legislates

“Embedded in things and not just in sex”

I study the past to denaturalize the present

Pink stucco shell, gooey rot center

Are mares really impregnated by wind?

There is a clock ticking deep inside the bedrock

The Door to Hell has been burning continuously since the origin story

The threat is steely, latent, and inextricably linked to everyday violence vigorously and unequally enforced

At the crosswalk an assortment of self-satisfied men hoard clammy wads

A gloved hand extends from a tinted BMW to offer a brown banana

The disorder is individualized

A cloud-based living package of commercialized affects and capital functions

Radiating out across the land like so many orange jumpsuits

You call it a god, I call it a menace

I want to say the glass does not shatter it unfurls

Not here or there but in the mist

Our hero the velvet river, our hero the friend fetching another round

There is a possible future in a tender measure

An expanded geography of pleasure

The way out is across, in ardor

Let it burn bright in expansive night

I hear them singing “I hold out my hand and my heart will be in it”

Singing “the yam is the power that be”

The sun it sinks upon the valley, the sun it sinks upon the hill

The dead, electively present, conduit for all

The both/and meadow—beautiful and bleeding

Lover of the gray, don’t rest in forgetting

Demand a future equal to polemic

Call this immolation love

The bones remember, gather around the legible bones

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