Poetry by Christin Call

New poems posted intermittently. Assemblage artist living and making work in Seattle, WA.

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When I was 14 and praised for using the line “The years fell into her” in a poem called “The Silver Lining”

By Christin Call

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Blue light and Kristallnacht, by Christin Call

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Eating the apple, by Christin Call

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Chair, umbrella, card table, cow liver

The action of words, doingness of the work of words, and the verb of doing a labor is vibratory membranes, speech, the beside us of the object. Here are Gertrude’s pork loins, salted and pearly red. Here is the tea kettle. Stubborn.

My laying the railroad ties in the besideness, swinging the hammer of speech a belief in identification, you aside from, you foreign land of lathe-carved spindle chairs, the umbrella and the chip on the black cane handle of the umbrella. It must be division happens in the soundwaves departing from my body, the emptying of voice against you.

Tell me again you loved me. Tell me again you loved me. Tell me the language exerted into the fold-out card table, and the silly Victorian lace tossed over it, where a tin coffee can left its ring of rust, did not add to the entropy of the room.

The doing of speech is to be with and without, an alien-ness of belonging, and the intrinsic predilection to become a train speeding from the horror of the known parts. Soup cans slouching on the shelf. The cow liver laid out to dry.

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nomenclature

the stale, red glug-glug from bottle to sink. you did know the relief, maybe, in some other trajectory-- of pausing in speech to swallow.

if we are here with no strategy, no suitcase, and sartre's tweezers needling our sides, then i was on the floor that night, i was a boat. all the blood in my body listing from one end to the other, from ear to ear and heel to forebrain the rush of the conch shell. and i was also one tree among others in the forest, tamping my roots so to descend with least disruption of soil. and i was in your room looking fondly on you asleep, because the other version of me had survived by walking up stairs, opening doors, moving through doorways.

there is no funereal rain-drip soft enough to excuse the living. a dust mote wanderlust avoids arriving only as long as gravity gives grace of lenience, or--like the wine-spiral pushed through the narrow neck of the bottle--the river and its agency described by eliding the landscape's own provision of history.

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Obscure Kingdom

Momma comb-yanking her fingers through to braid your hair, gap tooth like a sinkhole to landfill days imagining you’d play harmonica to crowds from the stoop, as circus trainer chase the squirrels, matchsticks charring fingers, whistle through grass blades to women in furs just descended from the trainstop, steam still unsheathing from their victory rolls and a Marlboro drooping from their lips like an obstinate nag of a question. From whose wall do we fall and crack to uncountable pieces? No one saw it happen. What was plucked from the periphery withered in the hand. Who razed our hills for the efficacy of monetary current? We only have our bootstraps flapping. And you, under that tarp, amplify the ricochets of direction, the fluctuating rattle and hiss of each thumb-flip caress. You are here, unaccounted for but here, shell-shocked but here, in this record and keeping of it.

[christincall]

Even more frantic gestures for an opera buffa

Timbrels tamped like a panting bride— whose chemical ecstasy composed in the olfactory kiss to nostril flares with devotion like the florid opening of a vase to its bouquet.

Admitting it’s my fault I enjoy lay-up drills and disco bowling in the parlor, of course Granny’s crystal gets steadily smashed— shards generously and repeatedly ground into the pastoral rug.

There is no excuse worth mentioning. We can’t help but Pandora like Victorian armoires our bullish body containers, tend our structural altars wildfired with old flames that insist on the game.

If you’ve asked for a penny I won’t farthing to explain I imagined what our stubborn chin grins would debate of Thrasymachus. I just want you to keepsake this empty amphora when you can.

And wherever its origins—the reckless maenads drunk on the parabolic curve of Keatsian desire, or the week I pedal-metaled from Baltimore to San Francisco in vintage hellcat form, unsmudged ruby lipstick mouth spitting out bullets through the broken crank window, effulgent dread with clumped nausea-rot ignited to smite the incandescent shame pressurizing the bones and the body-guts to coal; and, somewhere in the backseat, the dim-witted sway of failures kumbaya’d with the dull hunger of regret, their coltish manes streaming and tangling into their mouths like laughter.

I think I’ve had it in my right hand since then; it’s quite heavy, and I have never dropped it once.

Do you lap your tongue to philtrum in considering the responsibilities of the city-state? Justice would be recognition of its own incapacity. Air particles taste the vessel’s curve, light pulses back extraneous colors and leaves the red clay, sebaceous oils coat and smear into the absorbent surface.

Maybe this ovum is a citadel— I was asking you again if gravity really did hurt you that much. I wasn’t searching for anything in particular, I may have trodden on my own feet.

[christincall]

Diagram of the homeless bodies

1. In pillaged deliverance, we breadcrumb the ache of our moving, a colossal U-haul that amble-barges through dwindling street nooks. They bare and bald themselves, unnoticeably shrunk over stretches of metered years spent dust-bowling their ingrown ravines— hoarders of Jesus and Master DJ Skuzz pamphlets, collectors of condoms used as tourniquets on a curb that balls itself up like a stray, as if to disappear for good.

2. The perceivedly conned pedestrian-cum-passenger of undertones and segue ways back lots such tinseltowning of the stakes, what might be solidly driven through. There’s no relying on the sands for foundation. Youngishly, the crosswalk dregs shun the measure of drastic prints—as if predestination countered by disdain could turn our ramshackle gaits towards the rebellious direction unknown. Underneath is mysterious enough, dermally unpredictable as shriveled leaves coughed up in the foot tread.

3. Stench unrisen yet on the subway commute morning-aftering its aubade to a meet islanded adrift in years of separation, there a horizontal gravity against tile walls where a young girl huddles on soot-inked dailies— throat constriction, heart-knot like a garrote where you see in hers those drowning eyes of mine. Yes, you were late to work. Now soothe this one-time scrap of divulgence and be calm, dear, of your confession.

Now may that discovered guilt puncture your lungs with the regularity mine were, calling ineffectually, exhaustedly sputtering on the body’s own liquids. May that shame-hold choke out the smallest pleasures from of any encounter of a passerby’s errant expression as mine was and with even partial the adamancy I would have come to you again, given permission.

Floundering has been constant instruction. I can inform you, after many long years you’ll tire of gulping at the waterlogged air and, bloated, succumb to the foam of the shore.

[christincall]

This is a question

(for Cartograffiti: Will you handle me?)

because luggage, what we are required to carry, and touch—the ridges of knee, these pinched corners that fit the inner elbow,the creased, paper-y skin. an “I told you so,” kept under the tongue like a pebble you’ve refused to empty from your shoe because years are the claws sinking deeper, eventually pulling flesh from the bone

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1. simultaneity, what gravity grants the heaviest load equally to the light 2. your knuckles, withdrawn when the dozer attempted to jump over the moon, instead demolished it 3. lattice-weathered, acceptance and trifling of chapped nuisances for the entropically beguiling malaise 4. we exist here           in-be                    tween

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edges? no, the velutinous electron field that declines. other? i have loved as clumsily, failed to dispatch with adequate urgency how deep the eye set in the socket, how firmly the nerve to sphenoid. know                  you are my bedding turned down. know that, though impermeable, my diurnal blossom is for you.

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the grinding grip of teeth in sleep as Bill Pullman careening nightsky pavement, and it means my suitcase distrusts the conveyer belt, whether or not loyal to the folded shirts and the extra sweater, to the chucked vaulting of its own rumbled, grimy passage. we could commit to dumping our own bodies                      in the riverslime and be done, or to what sallow part of the argument remains— i give up predicting the result of that standing request. here is my firm regard and my terror, my sweating palms and my parted lips. i give up i give up i give in and give it to you for you all of it.

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ennui, what Other gapes its strangeness, for whom the resident ghost of eternal agonies actively avoids, chattering the horror, the exacerbation of loathing. bureaucratic, paper-pushing scrapes and cuts, and a 1,2 a- 1,2,3 cut paste shimmy cocoa pop and drop, this nuisance and aggravation to pleasure, knees stained green tumbling in the lush, decaying, dirt-smell and wondering, is this it? is this? what about this?

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Are you there, Laura Mulvey?  It’s me, The Ridiculous Blight of the Earth.

notably       ‘Refreshment?

comparing gaze        do we measure eyeballs in fluid ounces or Kelvin

cuz the HIGGS-BOSON‘s just plain invisible when ya try to stare straight at it

like a solar eclipse turns ya blind       like too many nights dialing ‘0’ on the pink telephone line

and I forgot if I was looking with my girl eyes or my man-trained to be girls of men eyes

            I’m just so dumb I’m sorry

       ultimately             deception (?)

il ne cherche edelweiss        like Julie Andrews

might say if she were existential that spunky bitch lmao

       on the sofa             is tomfoolery              collapse

his fair lady: master, please hit me again for speaking with my mouth             and thank you for teaching me where to put my tongue                   when pronouncing my “r’s” and what else                          can I do to please you

such as calculate the statistical probability of ‘appearance’              corresponding in backwards loop to ‘seemingness’ the judging of book covers and whatnot

                                          but alack! doubt thou the stuffness of stars is hydrogen              fueled to grant all humanity’s wishes excepting the thousands of years its light must travel to bestow them doubt thou cruelty is the most natural kindness or kindness the most unnatural of cruelties

       imbecility! we all             want to call it out

admiration! femmina! Wanderer! the abyss!

we all want to know if morality is really worth anything

       One more mask

darling              that is the secondary role requiring permission to buy groceries for that delicious casserole the whole neighborhood gabbed of profusely all Memorial Day Weekend

mandarin oranges sliced, cottage cheese, marshmallow bits in cherry lime J-ELLO presented on a crisp, green lettuce leaf

and how funny, by that I mean how odd and by that I mean I have not stopped crying

deservedly        the will to power is the constant by which our drives will sink or rise

so rise up, little gentleman             what a good little knob                    it’s only an advertisement after all where two atoms like mice on a track are forced to circle for miles, then collide with impossible violence

blather (gag) sartorial ‘splanations

I’m sorry this did not make you happy             the reason I pause so often in conversation             is to say ‘fuck you’ silently

ce n’est pas…                          un vape?

            the shaman told me a diaphanous wisp of spirit desperately wants to align with my intestines

that’s why I’ve been so ill for so long

[christincall]

a map for un-remembering the future

casual bovine survey the concrete tomb where the thrush’s breast could quiver and flood with ill-advised affection. in the meadow disguised as a forest, a slender shadow shifts towards north— one tentative grass blade that points cartographically

to the valley of hermetics, the unending awkwardness of not-silence (mumble, jitter, mouth scrunch, puzzled elbow jut, nostril flair), the contiguous succession of not silences (dirt scrape, tongue cluck, wind whistle). i thought i’d only observe from here, but now. should i perform? i consider it only for your benefit, because you have arrived, and i want to please you.

the opposite bank house-lined to former toxicity, dingies hauled up on docks. sage and seafoam are the only lived colors for a fishing line thief, bright feathers trembling among the thick, rusted cables, longing for the birds they left behind a lifetime ago.

concrete-friendly is another way of rendering the wild obsolete. there are backyards of elephant ears to nap inside of, miniature dogs to yip and nip at our ankles, the sway of unkempt dandelions and the stiffness of an overly trimmed bush. downed branches like a ring of salt around the condoplex.

do you live in that Puritan steeple converted to modernized living or the yellowed coupon papers cast in the gutter grate? do you arrive as a worm, churning the clumps of earth with your own rumination?

no matter. the years have passed. all i can give you is this rusted propane tank,

a fingernail-sized, purple-white flower growing from the embedded casket, the sole of a fishing boot, this tire that has sun-leaked its color, a shoelace like a glossy intestine, two crumpled beer cans.

if you accept, you will need them on the underpass and on the raised highway. you will need them when you face the backside of two houses and see the trail separated by trees that cast no shadow on the ground ahead.

[christincall]

are we greedy and needful and hyperventilating?  oh, yes.

breath cannot billow enough, does not fill enough for a handful.

lungs cannot give to the hands what they need, and they always need

to be holding, to grasp around the circumference, to grip, clench, press their surfaces into another, to enclose, to own, to possess,

to have it all, whatever “it” could mean, whatever “all” could possibly encompass, to have this “it” for themselves.

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inflation is tacit misunderstanding of having, the tactical and bloated calculation of this weight, this pressure, into this yield of hand, the inevitable stock market crash will ask where else have we been assuming our fullness, where else have we actually been gone, ignorant, negligent,

riding our bikes with the tires half-empty, leaving dish soap in the glasses we drink from, sending letters only partially written, the spill of words left off inexplicably

foreign to us, our elbows, our intestines, any material part.

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foreign as dog towels and horse blankets makeshifting an abode on the lip of the bank of a forgotten pond in Massachusetts where frog wallops civilly censor the crinkle of your windbreaker with the heat-sensing fabric that chameleons to your mood so you can tell if you’re annoyed or scab-heavy or bounding milk-froth ebullience. it’s hard to know when they appear so similarly on the unbroken surface of the gray-watered pond.

you peer upwards then, over the edge into the non-reflection of a dishwater morning, an extra-sensory knowing that this patchwork tent, blown into gently by giant, invisible lungs, has shape, is held aloft of the earth, only because of this unknown, unfelt breeze.

i am here because i am disobedient. i watch undetected from the lilypads, cloaked by three claustrophobic birch trees that have grown much like my face— too narrow eyes encroaching on the nose bridge, crowded and pushing against each for room,

ignoring that you have bearded your way inside a swath of nothing.

possibility is its own imaginary trinket for a mind with open, wending halls,

for a labyrinth turbulently skinned with endless passageways.

they are leading you undeciphered and without interruption, the trick of distraction, the key to filling the mind’s occupations, to convert the somewhere of destination into the non-stop everywhere without end.

[christincall]

Throwing in the towel--chiaroscuro and other stylizations

Swift-sweeping, the next brouhaha to drop via single-serve, plastic-wrapped bologna slab scam on how to get GAME         is abbreviate, broker, bypass that female brain—yes, they DO have them! (incredulous voiceover)—

by way of propinquity, convenient, proximal empathy, a tool for the deliberate scoff, the score a scratch in the bedstead by the hundreds— haphazard patterns of vindication

as an overlapping of heifer contours at Lascaux, of bison confused with mammoths crossed with the distinct hump of the giant elk deer— one hundred-pound antlers a logic beyond 19th century biologists pronouncing its extinction by tree branch entanglement, whole herds left dangling like ornaments to starve.

Brain enlargement—if yes, we do have it— having cost brawn, flesh-cover, and swift locomotors, should comprehend. That luxuriously broad mantle of crowns and ridiculous heft, that brash expenditure of bodily stores—

presumes a display, an assurance and service unto female requirements.

…

We owe the proto-women like, a million Big Macs, having selected for the flexible penis. We owe it a “winky-eye” that the archetype, the familiar         trope, the formulaic and reductive—         is forged in our chemistry, and

        can hold,

        can at times express

actual desire

if there exist actual women, if we concede actual brains.

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W: Describe with accuracy      the rip of fabric,      the woven texture in the mouth      the jaw suspended,      the stifling of the tongue.

M: Rhetorically, in part,      and persistently as the sloth’s three-tipped paw      peeling bark off the tree.      The choicest agony,      the inability to pull away.

W: Describe with exactness.       Employ the fullest detail       so I may refuse to speak,       spurn to move.

M: My claw-tips to trace the ladle of hip,      the trochanter head to femur slope,      the puckered kneecap, the narrow shin—      a light prodding of your mouth,      its small hinge of jaw stretched,      tender grappling,      leisurely taking.

…

In a poetic lecture of Neolithic paintings, these scratches on the interior of nature’s vulva (he stumbles over the word) are a passion play of menstruation, where the sloughing of the uterine wall bears the evidence of fertility’s sacrifice, the potential of the interior, the mysterious dark

working of a people’s entire historical record, inscribing         the pursuit, the hunting down, the taking of its meat         the magick, the erection, the witch-doctor frenzy,         the orgiastic layers, the pigment-blown handprints,         the hollowing that holds and is condensed, flattened

like the reflection of a pool for viewing time— a wavicle in quantum physics, whose fluidity interposes distance.

The dark art of conjuring the mark, the making a thing come into being fully-formed merely by shaping it, assuming its outline,

fixing essence to symbol.

Not separate from some hidden requirement of the love function, biologically-defined micromoments of positivity, existing dans les petits morts, the charged rubbing of pigment on stone, libidinous energy culled from mere static.

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The brain, yes and yes we DO, in cahoots with the whole process. The brain slurping up that reservoir, gulping down the body’s resource, edified in tandem of selective need.

Whatever the brain wants, the eons have mapped it so, embedded it in the deep folds.

And sometimes you want the most obvious thing—

someone whose sole purpose is to cling to you unabashedly, to slowly, almost imperceptibly move along you,

your circumferences and circumstances, your fixed points, your bevy of griefs distended in place. With terrifyingly gentle claws skim about the contour of the equation, draw a cameo for the broach, stare and stare and stare in wonder.

[christincall]

signpost of an undisclosed location

1.

the thin plume of outermost shadow,           you must brush against to know, the far, far away-ness inside you—           smoke a fine smothering           to disagree with atmosphere, salty sheen and hollow flapping           that has left scratches, dry crackling of feather valves           that has dug deep troughs.

exoskeletal leafcover of dreams           has gouged at the smooth muscle contractions of the silting universe. lacquer and pulling away that nuzzles you against the smell of musked tundra thaw, lavender fields damp           with Gastropada silver.

recurringly, the one where you were bedded with the preying mantis. clemency and vagrant distillation           of gesture,           of mandibles, where the heavy fog of other nebula rode a cold wind to your quills,           seared and ripped from you bristling to wholeness, copulated with greasy antennae           the velvet-crumbling, star-coital completion.

ecstasy belongs in that ether, in the dark matter of the limbic system you wave your hands through            to imagine its substance.

2.

now we can begin,

          but not where you’re thinking.

no,           you must go over there now and be apart from others.

you must conjugate in separation, move with the long vibrato of stillness.

then you must enter over there, farther still,            there,            at the point of everyone who was and is and will yet be named, everyone whose remains are nameless, who remains unmarked, who have occasionally bared themselves from shallow mounds.

of everyone who delights in the yodel-call of naming,            its resounding echoes in the clover-green valley, the elemental genesis of light and dark            an attribution of insignia as if fully formed, attaching identity            as neutrinos faster than light.

of the ones who could not remember theirs, who forgot to form the sounds, who were forgotten by themselves           and then, later, by others.

of the ones who came and went without its badge           before there was need.

3.

regal fruit pulp drips off her fingers, slides down cleavage, is absorbed into her blouse.

milky water stirred scatters the quasar light of rice constellations.

mulch crumbles its way through the handpalm that holds it, eventually.

4.

without form, the unfamiliar           that spreads nothingness is a strangeness you must recognize by singing needfully into the light years, whispering into the particulate matter of its unmaking shape.

galaxies of the iris collapse into the black hole of the pupil;

beaks whorl hastily about raw carcasses, biting through to bone.

it stands next to you from across the room, an event horizon. it hammocks you between startips. the imagined now of the created past hurling towards inception. all the wanting wanting that stretches. an infinite, waking slumber.

[christincall]

the testing of the proximity systems, the rotational systems, the galactic spirograph

spindle-stitch to draw the chart,         spiral spark of practical starts and stops.

        in the observatory                 the foot placement, I the desire am let’s we are                         wanting, working the pinpricks,                 measured gravitational flotsam and something         without destination sparking the arctic spiral to embark

on the dotted line,         a peer-reviewed study of density                 where detritus glows red.

                        in the fling of fibonacci there is assumed                 a reduced timing         that tenders         ignition,                 dispersion,                         whirling nerves with lit up ends                                 into vacuum

                what we chart and cannot see                 infer and cannot decipher                         doing so to stipulate with equations a turning,

                                the hypothetical scenario                 that standard regulation is obliged to acquiesce attenuation for while testing the systems,         proper systems that tighten the span of curvilinears                 and sunder spiral spiral spark descent                 into the iris of the galaxy,

        the violently reduced matter and the timing of time and space and timed spacetime timing apart from                         lightspark the parting particle.

                                where we are broad in the toes of desire                         an arctic moonface you cannot see brightens hemispheric sensors,                 the cusp of stipulation, curvilinear drift,         the ignited spark axon-dendrite spark nitrogen-hydrogen sparks the correct procedure.

we connect the we who are the wanting,         the wanting we who are broad and sensing,         the I the desire I wanting am the open moonface mine                 the iris mine with flotsam and surface sensors in hemispheric task,

                        mine where the spiral regulates the stitch                                 of increasing distance, decreasing density                                         sparking the lark of spiral you                                 you who are lost to the moonface,                         in careful drift,                 nerves whirling lit up ends,

        you who are lost because I lost you to the swallow throat of darkness         the peristaltic black hole that took you and I let go

                you who are lost because the spark larking burnt out                         to silence, to gravitational drift                                 to what was lost, you the lost you, a never arriving

                        something-not-destination losing of you                 in sparks of spiral spark arc of moonface                 the broad moonface my moonface only mine and the whirling connect-the-not-a-destination

which isn’t or is or isn’t and is where I let go         with timing and without the spacetime of you the lark of you                  there

        where we studied with such diligence         and the most correct procedure                 in the observatory,                         which will someday also be lost.