Monday, June 3, 2024

Katie Ebbitt : from Air Sign

 

 

This text
is a failed template
for another text

a failed attempt
to linearize

I want
to sanitize
to avoid

the timing
required to
go back in time

I think about attending
your funeral

you are
a body that I will want
to see dead
you are a person
whom I will always mourn

a town means
something small
and it was
cold room
cold door
cold kiss
cold sound
I don’t like these conditions
saw the raw
and moved away

this is a city
that was before me
not the inverse
which started
this dream
to forgot
would forgo
a memory castle
the one
lined guards
parceled
and proxied
in 2D rooms
I wanted
a rope like a throat
a gravitational drag
above
the giant
silky stretch
of written
sentence
I sit inside of
gold emitting forks
like branches
your genitals
giving a certain
sound
pursed
two lips
small particles
a lilac affluence
I was twenty
twenty-one
twenty-two
twenty-three
asleep in
polished syntax
psychotic
neural light
grabs me in
the elevator
of the library
as you pull rope
veined with
a light blue soot
smile
posture bulbous
on the edge
of your counter
I open my legs
the height difference
should have tipped-off
the last time
only smallness
relative to yours
knee-jerk pullout
before the blade
of consequence
made a return
to the before time
impossible

 

 

The preface is
too long
to include
in its length
there emerges
an insignificance
I want to
write a sacrifice
an auto-offering

 

 

I am not bad
I am
vicious and weird

 

 

Rebirth is a
narrow passage
a boiled
ocean
a wreck
church
a bad history
desire breaks
a dew at the border
of delusion’s shelter
imagination
a singular
triumphant sound

 

 

It was the last day. It was
1988. It was 2053. It was
1848. It was 1922. On another
plane, we have been married for
five months.

Before the
world went sick. The
roof a servant’s
quarters. I unbuttoned
my shirt, you reminded
me. Said what I wanted –
you reminded me. This
is a text of reality. I
cried at lunch and then
at home because language
does this. Language creates
a void, and in that void, a
story unfolds.

 

 

 

 

Katie Ebbitt is a poet/psychotherapist living in NYC. She is the author of the chapbooks ANOTHER LIFE (Counterpath, 2016), Para Ana (Inpatient, 2019), Air Sign (Creative Writing Department, 2024) and HYSTERICAL PREGNANCY (above/ground press, 2024). Fecund, her first full-length book, is currently available for preorder through the Michigan based press, Keith LLC.