Finger-pad stalks dance off each plastic frond methodically, as your hand drifts
through our bedroom blinds. You stay in time.
We collect curve against timorous bone shard to practice our language of sound.
You measure heat silence—striking notation in aching connective tissue between
the groan of skeletal joists and the jostling of slick flesh. The cylindrical weight of bells
expand with your touch on my lips, stealing this gasp, your palm, your knuckle, salted
blood-to-toes throbs like heavy brass. Teeth percussive—permissive, too.
This stuns flesh and lobe, convex—fold to depress me.
(And these are things we’ve known in our entangled skin. The wall we shared—ah’s and arms.)
Sleep is a cooling river that slouches crumbling banks. Your eyelids are our lazy grey housecat, and the shade
pulled to extension, before rest.
II. External Grain (Ursa Sonata)
this is music blended between
florid spaces
music for cats canary babbling sounds mouldering, music mintzed by men, thirded mutilated and marrrrrr
ch bells, april may no bells, seconded sootheseethe city (e) scape this is chirp chirp chirp
when it’s (finally) safe to cross the street.
III. Grain of the Folds
Push on ear drum from side/ align cymbal/ crash water in dew/ in cotton tip/ with tongue/ for/// in/// (& domestic)/ crash elbow to flight/ when/ pressure pressurizes life/ the loud is from inside the buzz is from inside/
///where once golden silence/ he promised you minuets///
reverberate! Careen! shhhh/ darling/ skol/ bard skull/ talons!/ school/ an -itus we can not/ rightly shakedown/ we cavort/ Shh/ cackle/ slsh/ twitch buzz/ mrrrow/ depressurized wife/ don’t you touch me/ o/ snapdrive that spike right through/ your fleshed lobe/ jamfix that sound/ build theme/ horde with eyesilt-glimmerer/ sir/ hinge/ meatthigh/ now/ then/ heed reticulated regimen to quiet/ hive dulls
you/ rattle your teeth/ blood will slash your tongue/ (silence is worth this/ and more) and man.
IV. The Loss of the Grain, where’d it go? Underthepatternedpatternedcouch?
i am out of your goddamned loop.
don’t look up there, none of that’s for you, it’s not even worth looking at. she said to the cat.
it’s shit to be a person, i feel like silence.
silence is the way to go, cat out of the cage, into the racket of buzzing golden bowl.
it’s shit to be somebody, or somebody’s old lady. It’s nothing to be lookinged at—p
peopletell.peopletell.peopletell.peopletellme no mores. you’re golds, lady!
i am shocked by the décor, again and again.
several someones slither back from the wayback to remind me, tapping, it’s shit
to be, a lady out of nothing.
through the glass, cat tells me he’s not happy—i leap to my lover, but i don’t have a chest nomores.
BIO: Kari A. Flickinger spent her childhood wandering aimlessly through the mountains of Northern California. She was a 2019 nominee for the Rhysling Award, and a finalist in the Iron Horse Literary Review’s 2018 Photo Finish. Her poetry has been published in, or is forthcoming from Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review, Riddled with Arrows, Burning House Press, Door-Is-A-Jar, Ghost City Review, and Isacoustic among others. She is an alumna of UC Berkeley. When she is not writing, she can be found playing guitar and singing to her unreasonably large Highlander cat.
