Video Poetry: ANGELIQUOI? – to the colours I cannot name
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
so
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?
In
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
by Angelica Poversky of Canada.
Copyright © By Angelica Poversky. All Rights Reserved.