FIELD GUIDE FOR F
FORM is what you do and feel inside. The form of an organ, its soft machine.
FURTHER is also located inside. Equal to the distance between now and later.
FAINT is the way the world works in reverse at dawn. The stars grow faint and then finally disappear in the light. The waves, once faint snakes of white, grow in clarity. And the birds burst into song from a place that is the opposite of faint, a place where there was no song at all.
We say “grow” faint like absence is something large and getting larger, which it is.
FACT is that which is undeniably felt. A fact is also the hand that pushes you against the wall. Less fact are the words said which you cannot remember. Even less fact are the words you wanted to say but didn’t, which you do remember.
Fact: how you love the term in fact, which acts as a sieve of experience.
Example: You had thought things were fine, but in fact, they were not.
FINE: can be something in the way of flour, powder.
Fine is a relative term.
Fine is dependent on how fine things were before.
The movement of wheat to flour means that flour is fine,as compared to wheat.
You might not call a pile of rocks fine, but what if the rocks once composed solid cliffs, worn down by explosions and the ocean? What if waves wore and tumbled the cliffs into the pile of rocks at your feet?
It might then be fair to call the rocks fine.
FIELD is located in the sense of an expanse. A field of study is the space in which the subject of study exists.
A subject might spend its days wandering around its field.
Fields might exist inside the field where the subject tends its beautiful crops.
The fields in the field could yield good harvest, or none.
The subject might one day, upon walking in its field, discover the boundaries of its field. There might be another field out there the subject might realize, other than the one in which I’ve lived. The subject of the field might leave the field, hop over the fence, and wander away. This has never happened, but it could.
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MYTHS ABOUT THE BODY
The body is a walnut. Not the shell, not the meat. Both.
The hinges of the body creak when they fly open in the night.
Grass creeps over the body’s train tracks.
The body is never poisoned by the water.
The body is a perpetual sunset.
The body is civil twilight.
The body is high noon.
The body makes mistakes. Makes many. Nobody ever catches the body, or makes the body sorry.
The body protects the world from evil by holding all the evil behind the body’s lips, where it swarms like bees.
The body is a bee. The body’s lips drip with gobs of molten honey and fire.
The body’s memory is a lost city.
“Let’s never find that city”, says the body.
The body has seven snakes to do the body’s bidding.
Nothing runs in the body’s family.
The body lives next to a river. It’s the same river that ran next to the body’s mother’s house and the body’s mother’s mother’s house.
In some myths, the dancing in the body never stops.
In other myths, time is a field for the body to lie down in.
There are three main obstacles that the body must overcome. In some myths, the three obstacles are the same obstacle that must happen three times.
In most myths, the body loses everything.
In some myths, the body has a garden. In some myths, the body has none.
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Carolyn Supinka is the author of the chapbook Stray Gods (2016, Finishing Line Press) and is a writer and visual artist living in Portland, Oregon. She has an MFA in poetry from Oregon State University. Her work has been most recently published in The Sonora Review, Peach Mag, and The Recluse, and is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Heavy Feather Review, and The Shore.