“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.