11/1/2017 Poetry by Allison Hummelgalaxies and hurricanes Untitled My mah jong card is a blank field of ice. I am still here. Heard someone say: I’m turning 60. I’m going to write a novel. I’m turning to glass. I’m going to write a riddle. What’s strange and strangling and time all over? What is me, what is us, unknown all over? What’s to become of all this turning-over? Sleeping cold on a blow-up bed I dream a high death count, my spinal torque, my cloud covers: I am turning to water. -Our globe collapses inward, an anthill. -A sucking sound denotes these end times. Will we p s s p p s a s s a a s t o o t to ? hr r h r h c s c s c s Will we cross paths? The tantalum mines are lakes of red ore. The screen recognizes touch but do I, and do I, and do I? After Narkopop 7 I. I read of ergot in the belly, bodies in the bog, and a sad piano conjures up some nothings, wisps of ghosts, a flock of gray cirrus clouds. Suddenly, a baleful oboe. How strange that a ghost can be a glitching image on the internet (i.e. Nicolae Ceausescu, stretched and crunched by slow Wifi, almost a bar code-) and a ghost can be the bag of a human form, ochre with tannins or a trapped anomaly or a flutter of data II. I like it best when ambient music sounds like my computer might just be malfunctioning and then a pattern introduces itself and the soft circle of it could draw me into sleep. Briefly a moth dives into my bra, then ascends, nothing lost, no loss of powder on the wing. I see it hover near my luminous screen. The chasm so vaporous between human deed and the afterlife of digitization makes me feel like butter in a hot room. III. Time like a vampire bat, drains the life from life renders things deniable arguable or contested. The phasing out of Helios allows Apollo. And the inception of new narrative is old alchemy, conscious animals werewolved into bouquets of information. I struggle with my connection. It keeps dropping itself but I hold the body of the other (from a distance, allow fragility) and I attempt to keep that vision on my retina stain of light and smear of shadow something to take with me to antiquity and its void, conduit to the empty ocean Untitled I. So much beautiful wind I can hear it like shuddering curtains or a cascade of liquid static and the loose brushes of palm clatter down. They rest where they fall. A cold weather has persisted, and we are all a bit bent at the middle expecting movements of spirit or a rash of ascendances, or disappointments, the falling short of decency. I remember Alameda de la Pulgas, and the symphony, then the ensuing, calcifying long skein of my time which I followed here to the museum: the soft gloves at the museum, and how, after, the hands feel strange without them, slightly cold, and vulnerable something that was unborn and then born in a moment, the way all things are born. II. I was writing a poem about a bog mummy. (I told this to Otto, cor blimey he said.) This before the wet strangeness of mouth on closed eye, omen adrift and settling. A preemptive healing touch, which spoke of an abrupt and extreme pain that had not yet landed. III. I spent one night with Otto. It’s not the kind of love I want but it was a thick and viscous love-- an apparition, left my mouth numb IV. I swim around in the bell of my solitude. The emptiness of it, the single bowed chamber, is what allows sound. I attempt a cohesion that is not in my flesh or blood. It might be another quick, silver fish a line of light moving beneath water, wavering thread of longing that brings the parts to wholeness Untitled Last of all a cup of tea and second to last a piece of apple cake and third to last I brushed the cat, I think, all the way back (b a c k ←) b a c k to sixteenth to last, driving alongside strangely uniform clouds, in a Styxian sky, past the Ojai exit. When Till and I were in Ojai we sat on the picnic table, and around the same time, discussed history in relation to some young people that never did anything terribly wrong. “History is like the denouement of a car crash. You observe it through the window of a train in motion.” I did not say this, but think it now. When the train loses all propulsion, heavily resting, this is also history. Anyway it was daytime, voluptuous sun, round and lovely, first of all it was the sun and last of all it was the disconcerting fact that all but one of my lights were out. Now the Ojai exit, sixteenth to last, it’s also history. History, → and the Romanovs are a tea brand, now. I found the foil packet at my grocery store, purple ivy. ![]() Bio: Allison Hummel is a poet currently based in Southern California. Comments are closed.
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