[the incompressible shuffles into place]
substituting one day for the next remaining attempt to emerge from the next gesture skip deity made entirely of language, to the next instant justification graveyard, like content, like everything else, like a given epic, like another battle dream beach distance, another metaphor without preemptive assumptions.
we are through and the matter is time, is material substance, is too many free radicals, a consequence for contemporary rethinking, but what account accounts, indexes rational skips to the next gesture stale regime?
I want to believe in conclusion forest, in an ascendant transmission, but the pain remains, the places visited remain, a reverse placebo reverses reason that never was, because incessant dread snaps cool, captures remains doing the same.
Copyright © 2016 by Frances Blau. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 1, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
“The work is marked by all the wild and grainy cross-hatchings of kari’s first personal
singular, an ‘I’ at once coarse and scarred and morose and tender and bitter with the most
impersonal bitterness, a tre[m]bling condition longing for a situation, indeed, a sayable
you, an ‘I’ undone by rage, and rendered by a broken heart the body can’t contain
counting the dead, counting the days, counting heartbeats.”
—poet Rob Halpern
kari edwards
Known for her work as a gender activist, kari edwards published several books, including the posthumous poetry collections Bharat jiva (Belladonna Books, 2009) and succubus in my pocket (EOAGH Books, 2015).