Wednesday, April 3, 2024

Isabel Sobral Campos : Five from Poems from Capital

 

 

 

 

“if commodities could speak, they would say this:”


on waiting for the blue sails, a rigged cloud

entranced by a twig trapped in a button

on waiting for the sutures to undress me

my body is a reflection of your leaving

like a supra-sensible lipstick cover

an auto-erotic artificial blow-up mouth

on waiting for the thaw of an ancient genital

a flower clad by a pig’s snout ruffling mud

on waiting for its wet verbiage to heat

a shell made of greasepaint and rouge

like defending the dead from a dead word

a contractual defaulting of my ‘depth’

on waiting for the pegged ricochet of being

a ‘self’ deprived of doors, adown & away

on waiting for the rain to wash out the cliff

& all that hangs from it by a spindly finger 


 


“the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their
use-values”

 

every puddle in this poem wets my feet

every membrane clones my daily sweat

every patter rubs my bony collarbone I got

for free every tube circles the pale heart

I was given every lotus root is a new palette

every time we sit to wring the day which keeps

distending every sheet hides my rodent hunks

& snares every silhouette conducting breath off

a silo of being, afterimage bowed by a string

as the ampersand turned bullet, not

transmitting from a wilted plant a mineral

S.O.S., bruised ballast against belittlement

every monsoon wipes half the world

 somewhere you will find a worm waiting

somewhere a larva will replace your heir,

or perhaps you will have swallowed it


 

 

“the physical body of commodity B becomes a mirror for the value of commodity A”

 

talk pack, talk erosion, the prodigal back

humphed bottled up compression of

spine & disk, each increment regimented

by gravity, I sweat with hands in unreal

pockets, so liturgical mumbling, doubting

the air pit b/w my lips, so cushy, so ileal in

digestion, the mantric beat of slow body, that

slushed sound captured in the interim of

ultrasound, a thump procrastinating b/w

life & death in the escargot rivulet, groomed

pool mirroring a body’s busy barometer

speck or thorn distorting crystal surface of

oriel breathing, this trembling figure painted

on a concave mirror, mouthing illicit phantom

we lay on our backs watching the sky’s

mutilated web between sunless trees 

 


 

“As a commodity it is a citizen of the world”

the sky lightly flickering its aging clouds

the sky spattered with lonesome stray light

from a gauged waterfall perforating veins in

wind, the sizzling froth of ancient vapors

capitulating corpse, the sky is but a bas-relief 

of storms, electric flashes subdue stone memory

the blasted corrosion in this scarred sky

sprinkled blind by torches, compilation of toxins

the sky as circadian garden spread wide

communal in radiation, collecting drones

a vent through which birds breathe

chewed up transparent bits of dying foam

a smoky unrehearsed sparkle rising

from a mountainous volcano mist

a swirl deepening the cold rutted shadow      

of rock lisping sibilant crushing wing-flap

 

 

 “20 yards of line = £2”

you look at the reflection of my name

[                                                       ]

 

bald hand rotating through swirling snow

in dark blustery of winter & its toneless trees

in the gut of a cloud time ticks around

a shadow exposing reflex resistance to speed

your eyes open to opacity, our disappearance

as slush dense with crystals, catalyzed as cones

the stillness flashes in scarlet hues, spells

an unknown planet waking up to unknown thaw

the rib is a broken branch dropping in

slow-motion lashing at the empty rock

snowflake stitched to snowflake

as the slumbering eddies prepare a murmur

you are on the flexed, purple rings of Saturn

your sleet alchemical sore on a deepened eye

 

 

 

 

Isabel Sobral Campos has published two full-length poetry manuscripts, How to Make Words of Rubble (Blue Figure Press, 2020), and Your Person Doesn’t Belong to You (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2018), as well as several chapbooks, including, most recently, WAVE 1.0 (above/ground press, 2023). Her manuscript The Optogram of the Mind is a Carnation was selected for the Futurepoem 2023 Other Futures Award and will be published by 2025. Her translation of Salette Tavares’s LEX ICON is forthcoming in May 2024 with Ugly Duckling Presse. With her sister, she is a co-founder and editor of Sputnik & Fizzle press.