Elisa English

“And the other wolf O his mouth aches in mine O his mouth Opens in red ribbons And red windows

O the red room of his mouth That I am sleeping so soundly in”

-Dorothea Lasky, What is This Journey I Am On-

“Laced like this,

diadem like this,

we live the past/ present/ future/ all at once

and even now.

Wouldn’t we tear seas, cities, money to get to each other?”

-Sarah Gambito, Grace-

“oh

strip my safety vest        I am just one yes in this overmuch world”

-Paula Cisewski, Personal Universe: Summer-

“We also write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely. We write as the birds sing, as the primitives dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it. When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my colour. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.”

-Anaïs Nin, The New Woman-

If you’re wondering where I am, I’m currently looping through a not-entirely-unexpected re-creation of this. I say “not-entirely-unexpected” only in service of the fact that it wasn’t expected today, but they rushed the results because I’m me and my “me-ness” continues to require a level of compassion for which I’ve always been grateful. Either that or it’s because I sound twelve on the phone.

Anyhow, when I talk about souling (I really don’t know if that’s ⬅️ spelt right, but I do know I’m not changing it to *ahem* “scrolling”) with my animals, I’m being more literal with that term than I am at almost any other time. And this little poppet, blessing of a mini panther that she is, has a tumour which leaves me both quietly devastated and focused on the logistics of her surgery.

“If love wants you; if you’ve been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills, with warm blood and cold. With feathers and scales. Under the hot gloom of the forest canopy you’ll want to breathe with the spiral calls of birds, while your lashing tail still gropes for the waves. You’ll try to haul your weight from simple sea to gravity of land. Caught by the tide, in the snail-slip of your own path, for moments suffocating in both water and air. If love wants you, suddenly your past is obsolete science. Old maps, disproved theories, a diorama.”

-Anne Michaels, Skin Divers-

“When you stand on bare earth in your bare feet and the lightning whips through you, two ways at once, they say you are grounded, and that’s what poetry is: a hot wire.”

-Margaret Atwood, Sor Juana Works in the Garden-

“desperation is best described by all the places i let you sink your teeth”

-Khaya Osborne, When All the Dandelions Have Wilted, the Scratch of Tobacco is So Much Less Damning-

“I have never been a lonely god but when he kissed my mouth I could relate to the creation of a varied terrain like Braille under my foot”

-Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Have Never Been a Lonely God-

“Your face blazing above me like a sun- deity, framed in red-gold flames... in the travail of pleasure, urgent, tender terrible—my epithalamion circles that luminous intaglio —and you under me as I take you there, and you opening me in your mouth where the waves inevitably overflow restraint. No, no, that isn't the whole thing (also you drive like cop shows, and you sing gravel and gold, are street-smart, book-smart,  laugh from your gut) but it is (a soothing  poultice applied to my afflicted part) the central nervous system and the heart.”

-Marilyn Hacker, Eight Days in April-

There are nights when I know I’m dreaming. The world begins to loosen around its edges. Corridors open into seas. The moon hangs impossibly low. Gravity forgets itself—and somewhere in the quiet absurdity of it all, I become aware that none of it’s real.

Then again, what's lucidity if it doesn’t know itself? A little pas de deux with the reflection, comportment stripped right back to where yearning goes of its own volition. And no one has an inkling, except for me—or maybe you... They fly, summon cities. All manner of all things within the prescribed parameters. But not here, not me. (Although I do sometimes teach whole lessons, which freaks me out on a level I can’t quite convey. But only at night. And as for the day? They tend to run explicit...)

You want. I need. Switch it around, I’ll trade you for it. And so it goes...

Consciousness comes unmapped, turned like a key, our body clocks. A letter here, there... Not the poetry we inherit, nor the philosophy we construct. But this. Us. Forging. Circling. I’m going to call it love. Free fall as direct imagination. [Insert all the gods you covet now the mask is off...]

Oh my everything of languid self and melted hours. Pressed, alive and happening...

And isn’t this how it always is? Or should be? Beloved as more than beauty, more than in exposure seen. That which we choose time and again, simply because there is nothing else. It’s what we’ve always been, always felt. Hazy shades that allude but open into clarity still. Fidelity nonetheless. And let me be clear, not in academia entrenched.

The full me breathes a fuller you.

And what can I say? Be? Just bare myself in homage... Dreams... Extensions, projections. Turn up the heat, reveal all the fragments... You’re who I seek far past the lessons. It means...