Flower Conroy
Geolocation
How would you describe something so obvious
it doesn’t require further explanation?
They are bringing the mother
to the iced-grass mansion she has occasionally
dreamt about. Out to pasture
isn’t what was meant
but as when you bend to fetch
a coin from the gutter
& glimpse a jet engine’s heat haze, the phrase
now insinuates itself
into. The mother-
figure is being brought. Now by a hairsbreadth
the narrative un-
hinges, blued at the edges. The maternal is
velvet unfolding. Awakening being
the point of view
of the burnt-orange lampshade.
Not the shade itself, but the umbra spilling
from below the drum’s frilled mouth. As echo or refraction,
as sea glass or extinct(ion), of the end-
less ways to be in this world.
Somewhere a way
refused to emerge,
or was refused. And so became
a way of unbeing. The dance of Jupiter
& Mars, if patterened with string,
materializes as a circle
within a star within a circle, whereas each initial
star trajectory crisscrosses, super-
imposes, elbows braiding. The ‘iced-grass
effect’ was the result of
the silvery underside of the sinuate leaf margins;
the mansion the consequence of wonder.
Because the mirage encysts
the real object in vague-smoke & the object itself
insists its (own) unstable image, on their way, they looked at
then upon the apex hills.
A puddle acting as a mirror.
Sometimes what answers answers from elsewhere.
Elsewhere, cobwebby soft entangled hairs.
They are bringing the mother.
(Opening question from Internet Word Knowledge Test)
I Awoke in a Strange Bed
As if one chooses to vanish.
I button the shirt:
here gapes a wound of the self-
inflected nature. Like
stepping into the house
of the object
where a single rose
unfolds infinitely the structures
of its material body
but always the emptiness is
itself.
Meanwhile grass
martyrs out of my chest
as if I were
already a grave.
Meanwhile shores
rake castles into sand erasures.
Meekest imprint
below the surface where
a thumb pressed (again-
st/into) my wrist. I feel along a rope
of darkness, navigating currents,
winds & tides—glimpsing, not
glimpsing—teeth in corners.
Like a glass of milk
a centipede drowns in, penetralia
into daylight.
Meanwhile infiltrating
from another
room, the aldehydes & pyrazines of
coffee brewing.