Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday

4 Poems from The Geometry of Descent, section “In Line”

*

Even at this hour
she is dreaming
of “the color inside
a shadow” of
the fine delineations
proximity patient
hewn as if stitched
long hours in
repetitive motion
—not quite mechanical—
growing viral
as if over a
petri dish or
the vast swathe of
paper rolled
across-floor
tiny
graphite nub
chasing to track
a cross to cross
criss back crisply
auguring or orphic
omniscience
placed in flight
vanishment within
the cavernous
shadowform spaces
re-merging at twilight
with dust or
dusk half-
light
(life).

*

*

At night
she becomes
something bad
when no one sees
in the dark
her prowling
rends
tapestries, libraries,
shatters China sets,
settees she flails
against-wails
against stained glass
windows red and
white and bruise blue
of her murky cerebellum
shards she wanders
apoplectic round
recollected pollsters
nabs tidbits, soundbites,
rectilinear augmentations
to an AI reality she knows
no bonds within
illusion (illusive) other
outcomes lifts her
sledgehammer
scored flesh
rent flailed
pointillated
tattoos vanishing
at dawn.

*

*

Even at this hour
she is dreaming
of sandy walks,
sunsets, the solitude
of one
jellyfish in a
school of thousands
whispering the under-
sea gurgle of
granite ebbing eons
away-awaiting-
awaited as if
to differentiate one
shade blooming
from another, salted,
sponged, papers
splattered algae-
green scratch
off    life   mask
shade upon shade
she is winnowing
some unheralded
part of herself
away, lifting
ossified,
flawed
spectral,
translucent
even at this hour

*

*

she dreams
of insect carcasses
gathered along windowsills
the scent of trolly
wires, chocolate, long-
legged crabs, brick
winding round
downroads
mid-desert
prairie dogs agape
dust in her
teeth the slow
roll press engraved
—years later—
abstracted oval shapes
dried, split-open fruit,
on thick
Italian paper
no more solid
than her
now
rolling
over
in an etched
(sketched)
dream.

*

Jennifer K Dick is the author of 4 books of poetry and 6 art/chapbooks, most recently That Which I Touch Has No Name (BlackSpring Press Group, London, 2022), a recent art chapbook Meridian  (Estepa Editions, Paris, 2022) and the book Lilith: A Novel in Fragments (Corrupt, Sept 2019). She writes an irregularly appearing column called “Of Tradition and Experiment” for Tears in the Fence magazine in the UK, teaches at the Université de Haute Alsace in Mulhouse, France, curates the bilingual reading series Ivy Writers Paris and co-direct the Ecrire l’Art residency for French authors with La Kunsthalle Mulhouse Centre d’Art Contemporain. She hails from Iowa, and attended MHC in Western Mass.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx