Maybe I’m not as in touch with the harmful parts of myself as I am with the loving…The body still remembers the relationship, and most likely the bodies keep it alive in spite of the mind.

 Divination adheres to a body an expectation of storm. Instead a simplicity of waves. Arriving day after day. Waves. More waves collapsing. Upon a body’s shore. In foam a thread of music gathering. A body could be delivered. To this body’s shore. It would arrive wounded. Healed. In a state different from tumult’s imagine. Event is a light causing memory as a shadow. Ratioed to wound. Relative to love.

I listen for reverberations. That do not come. Habit blesses wounds with scars. What’s true is no act can be revoked. Time’s material is not substance or force. Idea knows no healing. Atmosphere calms or ignites. Will there be storm is a question of what inhabits air. You word furies into breezes. I dispense a cruelty I am aware is cruel. I am aware is love. Am aware flowers against you. In harm of you.

Polar negatives of a right knee. Laughter embedded in an elbow’s thigh. I squeeze a muscle’s shoulder. Another body vibrates indifferently to I. There no solve for this. Stuttering. No salve for this. There is alive in a shoulder’s abstention. Wave’s refusal of arrive. How does a body re-member an absent body. Conjure simulations of alive. Living. Within. Living. Without. On trajectories without intersections.

Wakes of living foam salival. Do not cross. A swell’s arrival on shore is trangression. As collapse. A wake is an unstitching of a sea’s body. This is not repaired. There is no available repair. A wound fades quite gradually. Does not ever cease. I touch nerve’s severance in scarring of a knee. Less feel denotes no less beneath. There is alive like there is aware. Listening for. Not knowing what rings.

In spite of mind. Waves flower against I collapsing to bloom. A body of majestic autonomies serves what pleasures it knows. Sequesters lips out of a particular blue evening. Announces a manner of speaking within humming compositions of awareness. Perhaps a roar. Supposing a body’s autonomies sound a shell’s interior. Ear’s mirror. One vibration reflecting divination. Negating all say’s possibility.

A phosphorescent murder of clouds forms beneath blue veins of a wrist. It’s no good knowing. Spectacular emissaries of memory unfurl a language of driftwood. Charred. Fractured shadows of symphonies. I am a member of a body. It endeavours a re-membering. Asking an atmosphere thick enough for limbs to float. Still enough for any body to adhere. Sweat violeting a storm’s wake to force a conclusion.

What I am is a body practicing equally how to harm and how to love without being harmed.

 

…

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. A website can be found at secret-interference.info