15 | mg roberts

equus

—for Julian Brolaski

 

1.
A neigh. A sound of mourning. Such wretched utterances gives way to seeing better in yellows and greens.

 

——–a. Somewhat split between lyric & non-lyric, or however that might mean,
——–as in one’s own experience in the world: it’s all teeth and hooves.

 

2.
The residue of tonight’s evening news, where sense matters least becomes a question:
what is the reason to see? Lymph nodes mill into pockets—the invisible and visible— all
at once becomes a loop of silt, eucalyptus, fragments of bark, more mouths to close in
around & against pools of white.

 

——–b. There is no reason to fly. Where is the ideology?

 

3.
It is said horses will mourn the passing of a companion. Where isn’t the paradigm in the
sadnesss of present tense? Things overheard today and or degrees of this: (we should
have—).

 

4. I’ve been depressed; yes, rats eat their young, snakes shed their skin, who will eat their
babies? Bears mate and leave either way. Fathers, the way they easily disappear.

 

——–c. Horses have 16 muscles in each ear and can rotate their ears to reverse
——–direction, a position diametrically opposed to itself.

 

4.
What is contained in an ellipsis? It’s just spatial distance. A series of raw observations,
stored in opposite equal obtuse angles. What all this means is there are four equal sides.

 

——–e. During the commercial it occurred to me, I hate horses their sad eyes, their
——–constrained vision.

 

 


 

uter

 

Taking on sea in horizontal and vertical frictions
A glass            bottle   is foregrounded by terms

 

——-It takes on sea in                                         up       and into
How it sucks breath

 

——-Pitches directions
As if windcurl has meaning

 

——–Hello                                    accumulating plastic
Breaking into increasingly smaller       units.

 

——–Hello      other bits

 

 

 

——————————————————————————————————spilling urgently
Into other bits

 

———Plastic lapping plastic
A bundle of bottle caps plugs into the              wet              of the          wet

 

And
———————-grows.

 

 


 

mg roberts is the author of the poetry collection not so, sea. Her work is forthcoming in Dusie, The Sierra Nevada Review, and elsewhere. She is hard at work co-editing an anthology on the urgency of experimental writing written for and by writers of color. She is a Kelsey Street Press member, Kundiman fellow, and sits on the board of Small Press Traffic. Her second poetry collection Anemal, Uter Meck is forthcoming from Black Radish Books. Mg lives in Oakland with her three daughters and needs more sleep.