Laura Wetherington

I will cut my rich cousin. Cousin is a four-legged word.

I used to be fucked-up on the phone.

           I seemed to want to prove something

about phone organization or language trees

                beep beep your message has been

 

The phone waits for an underscore.

I am exploiting expression in favor of phonetics.

             I have an extremity in my extremities—

miming something like a solution.

                              There is no problem

        except for what we bring down in the open.

                                         I can't move forward.

 

                                  I make the listener a motif

                               or undress his syllabics

                  or we pass outside of dialogue...

                     the system waits for us to catch up,

                           it waits for us to move forward.

                               A moment never sits still;

               it preys on the mucus membrane

                     of the succeeding moment

                               like a disgusting uncle.

 

       What does it mean to witness in language?

                           I am wild in my fontanelle.

                           My tongue makes a movement.

 

                                     We all make friends

                                  or we score.

         Our way of speaking is a way of counting

               while not speaking is not not counting.

 

                             People are problems in prose.

We are naked in fragments that augment our parts.

             We follow unequivocally some disguise—

                             your man boobs, my man thighs.

                    What is hidden must be shown,

                 but not through language.

 

                            The middle of a moment impairs.

                                             The ending is its pair.

                                          It ends in a blood clot.

We deliver our champions to the city

There is no permanence for

the standards of design.

We can push analysis into a circle.

We live outside of reimbursements

or the possibilities of language.

There exists a belief that the doing

is reason enough. We think we are

trying when we make a trying face.

I need you to know: I support your

badness—your residue of meanness;

I support your faith in the endurance of force.

 

I am a superficial reader of emptiness.

I tend to deregulate reason in the context

of text, or in the context of speaking. We

can't get any closer to a superior coding

system for evidence. We have a sonic system—

a code of rules. You listen through me. We

repartition our sounds—long long and short.

We invite the encore

 

where the holorhythms unravel. Simple echoes eschew the texture. We're being lectured about. Your beats. We are everyday rhythmically completed. Part of me gives and part of you bifurcates. We are queens arriving around the same time. My eggs are heavy-handed and we give ourselves to these offenses—our enfances.

Laura Wetherington

<em>Edit Poetry</em> Laura Wetherington

Laura Wetherington's first book, A Map Predetermined and Chance (Fence 2011), was chosen by C.S. Giscombe for the National Poetry Series. She has work in The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare, The Minnesota Review, Sonora Review, Eleven Eleven, Verse, and others. She co-founded and currently edits textsound.org and teaches creative writing in Sierra Nevada College's BFA and Low-Residency MFA programs.