The Poetry Project

Genji Amino

from n e a r

dear x

was it a sink i thought i saw

a bucket of room

a heap of space

x

it was win win based on elimination

a body or so distributed by phase and remittance

you were preparing to do something or i was preparing to do something

so that something could go on

here

x

shape bent against a group of listen

coming before or after

i’m opened by the possibility of your audition

my being able to speak through

enclosed by and removed from

you

x

would have thought i would write a poem

put everything in the lower case

by averted gaze and invitation

where it gets easy to hear by recession

by adhesion

dear x

i want nothing so badly that i write poetry

one from another of my skin

along the lids of my eyes

amid the closet of my heart

only meaning of the want to say

person

as in

an enclosure unsafe to itself

x

i think i always did not want to talk to someone who was there

and now that you are not there i can not talk to you

it gives me pleasure

x

in appropriating myself

one said to another

you are my audience

you are my distant audience

as if a distant relative

seen only heard only through someone else’s description

x

i think this is not about kinship

but its resident impossibilities

i think the kind of longing

in this form of contact got fumbled

handled

so that now it’s the shape of our hands

x

that i’m passing through

it’s a prior thing that makes me want to move

being not mine

something i don’t want

and which is wanting

not me

yet here i am

not there either

nor again where you are

x

i don’t ever want to write anything

kind of incursion and disposal

to hear by knowing a word is not a chamber

dear x

i’m feeling the weight of address making the line bow

i want to see the shape it turns into

as this language meets you now

the kind of body that doesn’t know how to prefer letters

its letters are already letters

and it doesn’t need to be sent

genji

Issue 18

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