Video Poetry: ANGELIQUOI? – to the colours I cannot name – Artists For A Better World International

May 15, 2020 – Los Angeles: The latest Artists For A Better World International “Poetry of the Month” selection features work from Angelica Poversky, of Canada.

ANGELIQUOI? – to the colours I cannot name

I know the ocean is vast and vital- a massive part untouched

a small part, taken for its resources and magic

But like all water

The ocean recalls the bath of dissolution

The way waves can turn an ox into sugar.

Or crumble mountains to sand

Or return us to back to the earth

Gasping into the medicine of mud and weed

When I bathe the parts of me parading in paralysis too become buried

Washed off

I have seen wounded birds try to take flight and become taxidermied

Sometimes I forget that I am one thousand percent cellular, those days

I will forgive you still

because your hands are not physical

Your hands are the hurt that has stunted you

The taxidermy of a gauze you never put on when they tried to clip your wings

You call one of us an angel. the other pig

Leave us always pacificied in our animal heaven.

Frozen in a movement

A still rose dancing on cut music

Fresh flower wisdom become obsolete

breath suspended

at the punch

afraid to recall

The other side of the impact

distorted and deleted and generalized

Rhyme schemes in my memory

My friend rests his head in his kitchen sink

Like a wolf eating his own flesh

Bleeding at the art that has hunted him back

And I make lines of poetry in my head – at the same time.

How twists of tracker jack and hava juice have become a surreal imagination

tamed by my tongue.

I absorb bodies

That crave a safe landing

I beat with their heart then

cushion their fall with pillows of pages.

Praying for

every painted picture to become wet again

tears have watered the soil and it gives in

If I can’t fill in the blanks I can still let this flesh feel out

How do you give a funeral to what you cannot name?

How do you forgive to get yourself out of the self hunted head?

Guilt hereditary-

Running through his blood

The middle of a sand storm-

A waterfall of redemption

The bliss of not understanding but knowing

There is no logic

There is no arithmetic

Forgiveness

Doesn’t mean recollection

Reconciliation

With the breath that sealed her lips on the ground

Heal her throat so she can speak the release of feeling if not naming

Tumble out of ourselves

Even though the story is murky in its image it is nail sharp in my teeth so

Let the sound of my grief be the loudest soliloquy of exhale

Then let it dissolve into the sink like water

I accept all the colours of the water

It is

See-through in its face and always molding in its convenient shape

The faucet

Breaks

Down

The ocean does not cry, or perhaps it is always crying

A sound so broken it is whole

On el malvado, teruah

I have returned home

I have buried

To bloom from the deep

Again