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.

 

Samantha Jones, Karen Enns, Luke Hathaway/Daniel Cabena, Endi Hartigan + Katie Ebbitt : virtual reading series #31

a series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, originally prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space,

Samantha Jones : “Three Monuments,” published in G U E S T 22 (March 2022), edited by Kyle Flemmer, published by above/ground press.

Samantha Jones (she/her) lives and writes in Moh’kins’tsis (Calgary, Alberta) on the traditional territory of the Treaty 7 peoples, and home to the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3. Sam is a magazine and journal enthusiast with writing in THIS, Room, Grain, CV2, Watch Your Head, GeoHumanities, Arctic, and elsewhere. Her visual poetry chapbook, Site Orientation, was published by the Blasted Tree in the spring of 2022. Sam has a background in geology and is currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Calgary where she studies carbon cycling in the Canadian Arctic. She comes from a mixed background; she is white settler and Black Canadian. Sam enjoys developing content, including workshops, that highlight underrepresented voices and writers—she is the founder and facilitator of the Diverse Voices Roundtable for BIPOC Writers at the Alexandra Writers’ Centre Society in Calgary. When she isn’t up to her eyeballs in science or poetry, you can find her making epic constructions with her kiddo or browsing the book and stationary shops of Calgary.

Karen Enns : “Place of the Steelhead,” “Middens, Gordon Head,” “Night Sounds” and “Almost”

Karen Enns is the author of three previous books of poetry: Cloud Physics, winner of the Raymond Souster Award, Ordinary Hours, and That Other Beauty. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

Luke Hathaway and Daniel Cabena : As the hart…

Daniel Cabena (co-creator, with Luke Hathaway, of the audio book for The Affirmations) is a concert singer, recitalist, chamber musician, and singing actor; he is also a curator of texts and music. With Luke he shares the artistic direction of ANIMA, a metamorphosing ensemble — a place where old texts and melodies are animated by spirit and voice. To this work Daniel brings a background in early music and liturgical music scholarship and a commitment to exploring how music functions in different performance contexts and traditions. Daniel’s singing and teaching are also informed by the Alexander Technique, in which movement education field he is a teacher-trainee. He teaches singing and music at Wilfrid Laurier University and at Laurier's Beckett School of Music in Waterloo.

Luke Hathaway is a trans poet, librettist, and theatre maker who lives in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, where he teaches English literature and creative writing at Saint Mary’s University. His mythopoeic word-worlds have given rise to new choral works by Colin Labadie, James Rolfe, and Zachary Wadsworth, and to the folk opera the sign of jonas, a collaboration with Benton Roark. He is the author of four collections of poetry, one of which — Years, Months, and Days — was named a Best Book of the Year in the New York Times. His most recent collection, The Affirmations (‘a trans-mystical work of love and change’), is published by Biblioasis.

Endi Bogue Hartigan : crawdads being most precise ; second entries: |clippablefan|; hour entry: all galaxies are not clocks ; you be the woodcutter ; hour entry: All bells must hold all clocks

Endi Bogue Hartigan’s latest book oh orchid o’clock (Omnidawn Publishing, 2023) explores clock measure, temporal presence in today’s realities, and impacts of our obsessions with time and instrumentation. She is author of the seaweed sd treble clef (Oxyeye Press, 2021), a chapbook of poems and photographs; the poetry book Pool [5 choruses] (Omnidawn, 2014) which was selected for the Omnidawn Open Prize; a collaborative chapbook out of the flowering ribs (Linda Hutchins and EBH, 2012); and One Sun Storm (Center for Literary Publishing, 2018), which won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her work has also appeared in numerous journals and in collaborative projects with artists and writers in the Pacific Northwest. More on her work is at endiboguehartigan.com.

Katie Ebbitt : from AIR SIGN

Katie Ebbitt is a poet/psycho-behavioralist 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, will be released by Keith LLC.

Katie Ebbitt : on Hysterical Pregnancy

 

 

 

 

 

It has been difficult for me to write about Hysterical Pregnancy. A similar difficulty to writing the book this poem comes from. The physical act of writing is never so much the issue but the process of finding the words—the waiting for words to come when I didn’t want to describe the circumstances I was writing about. It was perhaps an unconscious protest. My cognitive capacity failing to produce the language that would make reality more real than it already was.

 

To write about Hysterical Pregnancy is to write about the circumstances in which the piece was created. This is the last poem I wrote for a book I began six years ago. I finished writing in Michigan listening to the lake crashing into the shore. A relentless sound making my tinnitus flair. The lake was warmer than it should have been. Evidenced by the neon green algae that glazed the water’s surface. Dead monarch butterflies scattered the beach. Their resting place hundreds of thousands of miles away from their intended terminus.

 

I was writing by the edge of a once healthy lake. A lake that once froze over in the winter with ice so thick you could drive a truck across it. Now a place where snow isn’t a guarantee in late December because of greenhouse gas. I was writing in a State that was once “blue.” Where once abortion was not contested. This “where” was within my lifetime. My lifetime has not been so long.

 

Hysterical Pregnancy comes from a book entitled Fecund. In October 2018 a poem came out as a prayer against the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Often writing is like a brief deluge and then the tap is turned off. There is language. And then there isn’t. I recognized that with Kavanaugh’s confirmation the anti-abortion movement was winning in a judicially recognizable way. That the conservative strategy to deny reproductive freedom was in essence ending its ugly labor. Roe was precarious. Kavanaugh made it terminal.  

 

I wrote thinking about my potentiality. The bulk of fecundity. The autonomy in biological response. I was writing about the limits of control. I was choked too. There is little other than bleakness in articulating grief. Sickness at dismantled healthcare systems. Politics touches everything. I didn’t want to be touched. I felt my hands shaking, trying to clutch onto a moving pram that was forever just out of my reach. I am writing, and continue to write, with sadness and upset and the emotional intensity of anger.

 

Hysterical Pregnancy is biographical. A dredge from an earlier time. Remembering myself in a different form. My body has saved and failed me. It is the unevenness of self that makes life so imperceptible. We are not ever out of sight from ourselves, but never fully in sight either. Pregnancy investigates the limits of selfhood. The ways we are both our own and not our own. I am hysterical. I am trying to articulate this. That the body is hysterical in its eruption of uncontrolled and exaggerated expression. That pregnancy is hysterical. I am trying to write that the body is ungovernable. Fertility demonstrates this.

 

 

 

 

 

Katie Ebbitt is a poet/psycho-behavioralist 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, will be released by Keith LLC.