#phrasis

[lifeinpoetry]

is it that music or need edits / my body

Wendy Xu, from “By Action,” Phrasis

[bostonpoetryslam]

Preemptive necessity is a phrase I'd like to unframe, people do plunder each other, teethed, telling you what you are

Wendy Xu, from the title poem of Phrasis

[mortalpractice]

I felt devoted to my new angel of losing time. Categorical elegy. Something I thought today was system error, was reverent, was one or orbiting nothing. No other. ---Wendy Xu, from “Some People,” Phrasis

[whisperthatruns]

Stilled as in image, at dawn sliding into blue harbor, boats clang, where does he the man I imagine gripping several ropes return from. Is he conflicted, does he perceive the sky oscillating like a dimmer machine, a mouth, a war, language not declaring its most effective self, bellum grazing ever nearer to beauty, a possible apotheosis how what is left of sense is comfort. Not inebriated much anymore, I rented a lawn to stand in with you, crueler was always singing to our mutual forks, knives. Our translation of a subject drones on unblinking, something black for him returning, his forearms there laid themselves down, ships gone out another pale-plated night.

Wendy Xu, “Phrasis”

[bostonpoetryslam]

Imagine a person upon whom nothing is lost, pulling the purple cabbages up head by head, half like devotional Those welts blossom your skin plural, you looking at me like nothing I need

Wendy Xu, from the title poem of Phrasis

[bostonpoetryslam]

Wind lifts strangely in lines of dissent, like care, all men blur together becoming a great nothing. I say to a friend all men are worse. No time for anchor design in a relative statement, one must fling aside       sheepishness though

Wendy Xu, “Naturalism,” from Phrasis

[mortalpractice]

The television, our daily panic chorus “I accomplish, therefore I am” ---Wendy Xu, from Phrasis

[bostonpoetryslam]

A halo of newsprint, when I became alone I claimed the greedy living text, jasmine, the sink sang its steam about the house. The war was a syntactical construction pointing back toward itself when I could not turn off the radio's list of fatalities. I locked my literal body inside the green deadbolt. The house breathed its hotter mouth, when I became alone the whiter hand of my country sweeping toward me.

Wendy Xu, “Recovery,” from Phrasis