Repetition Nineteen - Mónica de la Torre

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      in the air. They announce nothing

      but an otherwise invisible presence.

      It’s audible, though, as if chasing away something.

      Earworms, for one.

      What the wind has to say today it says only in passing.

       Boxed In

      Heads up, false friends use familiarity as camouflage.

      In the source language deciduous might be confused with apathy,

      but nothing could be further away from desidia than the timed

      impermanence of leaves.

      Yes, even forests engage in a form of family planning.

      We took for granted the tree outside our window until it failed to bud.

      A gingko, they cut it down when the building across the street went up.

      Since our view is limited, we like to imagine the situation from the

      missing tree’s perspective.

      Given the recent turn of events, it might have resisted blooming.

      It was protesting its decorative use to boost property values.

      Or perhaps after millennia of honing its particulars, it refused

      “the magic of tree-lined streets.”

      Concrete blocks these social beings’ access to fungal networks,

      prevents their roots from interconnecting.

      Are you a reluctant loner like the specimens that surround us here today?

      I hope you understand I don’t mean to ruin the relationship.

       Intimacy in Discourse:A Comedy In Three Movements

       After paintings by Thomas Nozkowski

       One

      Stick Man steps back

      containing multitudes

      of hues. “Ta-da!” he mouths,

      since he’s mostly

      narrow bands

      of diffused colors,

      a rainbow, faded,

      except for the saturated,

      tender-looking red

      square for a heart

      and the sore ball

      of his left foot

      supporting the tilt.

      Not to mention the display

      of acid green

      on the crown of his head

      and wrist, signaling

      the mind-body connection.

      The histrionics

      in the perfect tension

      between dexter and sinister.

      Welcome to showbiz.

       Two

      This binary roadblock here

      demands that you back off

      to keep on contemplating it.

      It fancies itself a zebra

      standing on diamond-patterned stilts

      for camouflage’s sake

      and fastens itself to an equally

      ornamented attachment

      as if to hide from its handlers.

      Forget it, it’s not interested

      in establishing any rapport with you.

      Blame it on instinct; it knows

      how coveted equids are in the North

      American private sector.

       Three

      Here’s your morality tale,

      an optical conundrum/psychoactive puzzle:

      the dominant lines lock,

      while the areas they delimit contain

      other lines within, of the faint,

      disjointed variety.

      Like interconnected

      people and the basic story lines they each cling to

      to remind themselves of themselves.

      Yes, this is redundant.

      In this picture, both

      types of lines compete

      for your attention, so that the eyes’

      only resting spot

      is a central area where color

      has enough room to settle.

      That old positing of linear

      thought patterns versus the dispersal

      of feelings and their counter-

      tendency to ground.

      In the source language disparate,

      pronounced dis-pah-rah-teh, is nonsense.

      Place an accent on the wrong

      syllable and it becomes “shoot yourself.”

      Let’s not overthink this.

       Divagar

      “There’s a lot of waiting in the drama of experience.”

      Lyn Hejinian, Oxota

      No signal from the interface except for a frozen half-bitten fruit.

      Other than that, no logos. An hour is spent explaining

      to the group what I’ve forgotten, to do with the mistranslation

      of a verb that means drifting but can imply deviance.

      The next hour goes by trying to remember, in the back of my mind,

      the name of the artist who makes paintings on inkjets.

      Why I’d think of him escapes me. Now my gaze circles the yoga bun

      of the tall woman in front of me. I didn’t pay $20 to contemplate

      the back of her head. It’s killing me. The pillars and plaster

      saints with their tonsures floating amid electronic sound waves.

      At such volume they could crumble. The virgin safe in a dimly lit

      niche as the tapping on my skull and the clamor of bones or killer

      bees assaults the repurposed church. This is what I sought, while

      in another recess I keep hearing Violeta’s “ Volver a los diecisiete”

      and seventeen-year-olds marching against the nonsense of arming

      teachers.

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