Paper.
If I did not list what I wanted, how could I recall all I desire? Thousands of feet of produce.
Such magic cannot come without cost. Celery then carrots, or carrots, or celery.
Almost any paper can and may not not be used against you. Create a distance. Drop this now.
Paper itself evokes chopping, bouquets of thistles and bratwurst. Alyssums. A hug of Alsatians.
(Release the pounds!)
No, keep it. Secret pocket. This paper will self-instruct in—
Plates.
Consequently, a breakfast and a plate: the meal evokes morning. Ceramic manifests pleasure
in shine as a person, out of frame, eats. The plate is for holding food. A plate is for kefi –
the irrepressible expression of emotion and joy. Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.
William Blake nailed it like a crucifix.
In Greece no one throws 1 euro plates anymore. To say opa!—no charge. Flowers,
for sale at cafés to tourists, are thrown, as displaced people watch, beg, incense.
Many things cause hunger. Many things cause hunger’s loss. To remortgage
your hope may cost you your hope. A chip off the old plate.
A ship off the old port. A slip off the old anchor of and/or.
A plate evokes cutlery, company, civility’s failed remarks. Perhaps, it evokes running.
To rephrase, it is netflix and cable bills and obligations to be punctual and productive.
To paraphrase, always carry i.d. It’s like a LARP for a New Canada. You too
can be a Person Without State. This is cooked. This is char’s fragrance. This
is hard to track with dumb noses. It evokes motives, signal, fragility, bank accounts.
Cart.
For today’s purposes, herbs, canned fruit, 7 melons to ball, an overproduction of order.
Once enough food has been gathered, a party is the natural outcome. To this end, it is known to some
as 축제. i.e., it evokes local. Slow. Slow. In Egypt, chouai chouai. Even sex also has to fry
its turnips one side at a time. The metal mesh. The cart, the deep fryer, the potatoes’ kitchen jailor.
A sweet potato cries a syrup which is a sugar, which remains the opposite of salty-bitter,
opposite of bland, opposite of spicy, opposite of savoury. A raw sweet potato is a hammer.
Is an impact. Poor man, smelt the hammer to make nails and staples to fasten down the world
in a vacationer’s paradise. Where is your hammer. Where is your lunch. Decisions of consumption
are made with the body’s intuition, in the unconscious systems, not in the verbal.
Bodies.
The cow walks on her mouth. Cows are more than their milk and stolen boys. Cows are
their lowing, their loving cups of hooves, how they leave their broken O O O O over the earth.
Nothing needs articulation but limbs, yet how to not move the tongue. It takes the soles
more energy to lean, or stand on peg-legs than to walk a new pace. So, go, autopilot
as the Jetsons, as the 50s, as forgivenesses, as all the body releases back.
Produce.
Understand me when I assure you that sex, I mean, avocados, doesn’t knowingly
sell wasabi as guacamole, but sex is just a middleman and as impartial as to soap.
Curiosity is an asylum. What we never knew we wanted can be bought
and googled and consumed.
Until now, a carrot has been known to some as a reluctant vitamin A and to others as a vigour,
interchangeable with a banana as a tool for a mind, just as a 香蕉 is a symbool.
Forgive us our vegetables, our lack of permanent woody stems,
our શાકભાજી, our سبزی. brothers that share our one air.
Hands.
My håndskrift counts against me. Mind remains the plural of mind. The tzatziki
is tiki lights, is beach barbecue, is pit cooking, is rafts, is bikini, is salty, is saucy, is white,
is spilled on the sand. Canned pineapple has been canned since 1903. Fruit is sex for sale
while showing too many teeth, but that’s just nerves.
Want squeezes around our knowing and no-ledge like so much melted cheese.
Ham is product placement in other shopper’s cart. The opposite of palaeolithic
is a tongue’s periodical. Desire is carefully placed conversational plants
of chitchat with chaps. A ham and a bowl evoke hemispheres, empty and full.
Each day is the haute cuisine of our denials.
Bakery.
Hesitation before answering is the answer. Agreed, a slice and a cake: a slice is not a whole.
Is a jaw’s muscle memory. A cake evokes celebration, retirements, birthdays, funeral wakes.
Is fruit is topped with English cream. Is a slippery slick slope. Is a muddiness, is a speed,
is a startle chased, rolling tumble with a fate complete. aAfat accompli. Is no change of clothes.
Is gap of dunno. Is laughter. Is self-deprecation. Is self with little room left to lose value.
To rephrase, it is an album. It is a snapshot. It is a pixel. It is a pixie. It is a mischief.
It is prochief. It is proficient. It is taking that gleeful stab. There is No Next Lifetime.
The cake evokes batter, heat. All is a factor, a factory, a fire. Is a loaf to a flame.
Is a rock to the lame. Is a limping. Cake is age, mortality, death. Just one, a single piece,
a single. Senki. No one. Each thing is on the plate without touching. Each person
in the room without touching. Each word in the earhair without, well, echo.
(Ma, sad mole’s trying to steal the soapbox again.)
Out of step is a kind of blessing.
How many soldiers on the bridge must march to set up a sympathetic vibration to shatter it?
Angers Bridge, 1850. 483 soldiers and 4 curiosity seekers and a thunderstorm wind.
Light.
I stand, but, the rhythms, they refused me first. Light is a vision of itself.
In this way, light is a particle mirror. It is a cleanse diet of butter tarts.
A jesus blowing music into a saxophone. Air out is a potent aphrodisiac.
Relentlessly whimsical, the multitudes net out to have one collective gender,
a choir of heartsongs in a band so wide left side cannot hear harmony of right.
Check the pockets of sunlight for change and other weapons.
There are days when sunlight is just a deterrent. Is just a detergent.
Days when lemon and lime can’t find enough sugar to bind them.
It’s the oxygen that eats the wick, the paper, is the smoking cigarette,
is a μπανάνα is a sigaro is a carrot stick clenched and snapped.
♦
Pearl Pirie writes like nite-lites but without electricity sometimes. Her most recent book is the pet radish, shrunken (BookThug, 2015).
She can be found at www.pearlpirie.com.
♦♦♦
Up Next:
“A rabbit can lie like garbage on the roadside, a wrapper flattened and flung by the rubber roar of petroleum fire,”
“it’s an innocuous item, a minor throwaway, not worth a second thought”
The Litter I See Project 