Ash Smith

To nick the rent on this loss with language  .  name   .  plate under everything that bleeds  .  cake pink sky  . hunger is a touch  .  needed colors  .  happen outside the frame the name purports and otherwise  .  Spinoza’s third kind of perception gets wired  .  bird coded  .  to make fabric erasures  .  written where you move  .  small snips to rend the stitchwork out  .  slowly from the speed of work  .   until it’s the kind of sky that lets you see it’s knees is a mistake I made in hurt from perception  . look where the money isn’t  .   autumn pulls out the threads  .  said a kind of relationship made by wrahseling  .  to stop from falling  .  spring blinks the green wires behind our eyes  .  into the flailing red of forever  .  double February  . come back  .  as if to act   " infinite series of first kisses"

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Brando’s hands on the pigeon’s body  .  a note we could hit but couldn’t hold   bright green leaf and freeze  .  big love   . little diamond  .  like you could stand up for everyone at once by making oneself exceedingly small as the measure of loneliness  .  measured the distance from my bed to the past like a sextet  .  measure to the mountains . to the larger water .  we push our apps together  .  to be the metaphor for something already on the inside  .   or if I could grow my hair long enough, Crystal Gale long, I might not fall through the cracks of commonness  . but for the want to be common  .  full grey body of the shared world  .  on closer inspection, the feathers connected  .  I am my own lice  . we push our apps together . She stood on the other side of the chain link  .  and because the frame stopped, stood there forever  . the little grey bird face wasn’t a mirror  .  he held it’s body to to the fence like a heart

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Cracked open the Lord with a verse  .  to write this book   .  I must disintegrate   .  calamus / reeds (née Kalamos)  . sethe fronds .  In the story the two boys love each other  .  one drowns when swimming and the other drowns in grief  .  becomes a reed .  calls now in whisper work  .  lament  .  the word means “pen”  . then .  the way the sound of the place of our arrival never comes wholly at once  .  the wingspan of  .   hear  .  baby high five  .  heaven in pieces .  circle of extraction surrounded by down  .  I missed you  .  still kind green clearing  .  née airborne body  . grooved plumage the needle caresses  .  I hoped we meant  .  red  .  red light  .   light glistening in the lower branches  .  small avalanche of light in the heart  .  to write this book I must reform myself in the shape of it’s large sound  . reptilian weave at the tongue .   throw the ladders of skin down from these zeros  above the beak  .  we’re just projecting into a absence like we could mean more by taking off everything on fire . but your house is made of air  .  of the thing that feeds it  .  you in the shadows who wore that water well  . Like Spicer’s swallow so: “How can I wound you with my well of sounds / if he can sleep and dream beneath it’s wounds?”  these bird rehearsals  .   to call when somethings gone  . that speak like paper fingers  .  to the body’s meat  .  

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Utopia is so emotional -- Lisa Robertson

sound hones a road home

no

rolled oars bore holes in the ocean of my heart
printed on a street poster and worn in

to by the cotton erasure

weather makes a vocabulary of decay

for which the feathers fell

reflected on the water

time takes a kitten eraser to the space between leaves

The way one might expand by misunderstanding

one's own desires

as if spilling from our mouths

I wanted to explain what the ache felt like
to come in the century behind writing

standing behind the long, wide L

if by a low script texted

if by the author emptied

this language that made me radiant and mere
as a screen in mediation

then to lack the assets to still the sea
as a woman walking so not to die

that a salt-like lucite became our resource

for divining the animal back into speech

or rather “No day shall erase you from
the memory of time.”(Vigil) So that what time

remembers we can forget.

Every poem is something you can’t get rid of

scrape me from your eyes

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Ash Smith recently moved into the green arms of east Austin. Daily activities include cooking weird things, stepping on Legos, laughing, forgetting jokes, making kimchi, decrying injustice, planting cat grass, murder ballads, and making out.