I walked around looking at the orchids, at their ways of being in air. Some of them seemed like they were holding it, like they were spoons or bowls…

 More muscled being of air than memory says. There are many methods of forgetting immersion. Countering are words reintroducing skin into fluid that are illicit methods. Not spells but which must be taught. Must be mapped. A body mapped back onto a body. As saying. Capable of sensing air’s sea on hair waving past skin. In memory of a past aquatic.

Creatures bound to soil. Flesh clenched to stone. A burrow erected as enclosure of air is home. Petals of an orchid tremble as I pass the threshold. Into held air. As enclosure breathes green. Exhales a fluid substance. It has a taste. I can open a mouth to hold it and I do. Without rhythm of in or out. Against pulse. To cease a moment. Being briefly a cup where air’s fluid pools. Before pump again demands.

Within a violet spell urging ache’s memory. Alive authors a mechanics of breath. A tongue of air serpentines legs. Bone feels leave’s ask as each rests in their stillness. Above a tremble in solar bliss. While breath flows cooling. Dries tongue’s heavier wet. I heresy a pleasure of growth. Their ways of being vibrate a living suspension. A note begins. A moan. A call layering itself across another.

I listen to music of the stem’s achievement. When petals open. Close. Their method of cells adhering to other cells without story. Forming a moist enclosure. Without melodic the orchid enacts a harmony. Glacial groan of leaves unfurling. Roots feline scream. Breaking waves of petals. Without time. Towards light intensifying. The low hum announcing sun’s vanish.

Holding. Held by air’s temperament. The flower contains a weather. My mouth pools an atmosphere that is not an exception. A bowl where a transmission rests. Where tide fills creatures remind. Stars and anemones in a landscape of flesh. A cup’s celestial mirror of desire’s atomic burn. Illicit methods in the recall of a burrowing aquatic creature of live inhabitations.

How air churns. What’s floral wants like what flower asks like. When dew glides in droplets down leaf’s fold to root what receiving tastes like. At mercies of weather. Care. At mercy within aerial. Substances that are a place to be. Thrumming comes upon until it is all time. Does. One thing until exhausted. Without and then. Without and. Leaf is doing like star is doing until not.

Breath sounds a floral pulse of opens closes opens never closes before a fall.

…

Aaron Boothby is a poet from California now living in Montréal. Work has been published in PRISM, Axolotl, Liminality, and other journals while a chapbook titled Reperspirations, Exhalations, Wrapt Inflections was published in 2016 with Anstruther Press. Website can be found at secret-interference.info