Backyard
Maura Pellettieri
After Ye Lijun
For a long time, I have lived in the backyard,
where I conduct miseries onto the wet feet
of stones I know. Places in this repertoire of hillside
revisit me and the love I wore for a man
who is a woman who transmits a country by her
thinking is shown to be
mere time. I keep looking at a clock
of the moon, who bends empty dinnertimes
into conifers, whisking dusk
into the heart-past
my cochlea, inside a body I own, which is
my love speaking backwards to me
through an owl who insists
on daylight.
I am wondering why we know each other,
and why you decided on the shape you are in,
and who made me to sprawl so well inside
a mossen light, damply lit upon
the ground, under the silent obsessions of evening
I cannot return to another hour
but it calls me from the quartered armies of cicadas
drinking my blood through slots in the parched sky
as if there is a house.
Convergence Destruction
Maura Pellettieri
At that point of gravity which her body had reached, she could give her own heart to bite.
—Clarice Lispector
I /
Brooklyn forms
do not exist or cannot be seen
from here, the same thing. landforms looking
to collide this year, quickly but until
they find place in other, witness is only a fit,
a false panacea. a friend knows
this is not how it works,
and tells me: don’t begin on top of
the bridge: to see all go underneath /
it / do not cross me or
lovers. to know power, be below it, and
you might remember the first two letters of
our name,—
I’ll give you what you seek in dying—I say this
to a friend, who does not understand
basic immateriality. maybe I was not wrong to leave
even though I was wrong to leave. maybe Pangaea
can be broken new even as it has been over
for a while, someone asks: how we
change. or, this landscape is not about fire; we are only rekindling
the extenuating-circumstances book, a Constitution of
Unbelonging, and then taking away
the air. before we all go up
in a hot balloon
of grief. maybe we are always in the room with the word
goodbye
trying to be spoke
between us. numerically, a crease on one landform met
another’s crease as if love was
mechanical, or math and could be
written, precise, be known—this is to say
the divides existed millions of years before the land
split; logic corroborates: what remains this morning
unsplit is millions
in break / maybe love is also
math / but it was never about love,
it was about liberation. which could be said to be
about inevitability more than wanting
freedom. but nothing ever all at once, departure always
wets its rivens
in stages., there was clockwise
turning, and probably
an opening, a separation—(no one alive
was there)—at the same time, Laurentia broke
free, closing the Tethys Ocean
forever.
until
forever flipped
internally in another body’s time / these collisions still
what / we are. Living: scraps
of cellular flares line the edges of a universe
expanding—on earth, we behave tonight as though
we invented math. as though, whatever love is
illuminated by—whatever language we have found for it,—
we are commanding. no story told or untold
is a separate story—still, there are others
you would tell me. some more potent
than humanity,—
but now Ocean has washed each side to fit again, only
by friction. We can own
seismographs, machines
of the poets, but knowledge nor intelligence pauses
guarantee—
land will rift, or at least eat its own.
edges and that is not
human., You are not: my
nemesis; my
relief.
Mafia Q
Maura Pellettieri
Why don’t you start at the beginning? Have
an architect. It it. Read the terrible
Man: After all things the did he,
I wanted. how was It—
Cute, very—I raised was not to
little in. form as See. In form little
things. belong you To to. up with this
Put. thing Me as
lil. Bow down to your Queen
Thing. I saw as concept
Small. So about? It’s of belonging
longing, the. Only the mafia
knows I’m capable
what of. Do it, Do it, screams
Mafia Friend. If I fuck the do you publicly
You’ll have no face.
No shame to put place your. On the hand one,
you are the inversion of your dissociative
segment, which is not even what
you think is it. hand the other
On, you won’t think this about
you. No, promote you’ll
it and its other invent. On the hand one,
I don’t want your name anywhere in my text.
On the hand hand, I want to do things right.
Stones point at me and scream
NAME US HIS TELL, Including you. him
the You. Impossible that you see
Yourself in mirrors. But Monster
Gay Am I. The bottle in the bottle. Something
In this shifted end is this shifted
end of Sublimation. Is not thing A:
—There was a violence. Else’s someone
Words. projecting me
You’re the patriarchy on. Oh! She says,
It’s a light gassing! Easy. A drops jaw. It I meant
Have Possibly Couldn’t. Leverage
The timeline replicates. Rest fiction=Oh!
She says, Appointing customers to days
Of trouble. This is production
For crisis. Queer mafia
Can’t leverage production of quality
Thought because grouping demonstrates
Labeling. Bye.
Maura Pellettieri is a poet, storyteller, and art writer. Her writing appears (or will) in Denver Quarterly, Vinyl, Fairy Tale Review, Guernica, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA at Washington University in St. Louis.