when the situation does not decompose you are making me know

Kirsten Ihns

 

the heat sees no thing, just knows

how to rise

supremely a filling action

       and

…it is steep to be young

 

give me just the instant! i will make it       out of view:

 

there are things i am glad

that nobody counts

the number of times

i do

 

if the good you are circumspect

if the flawless in it circummortal

 

though i go out like a         flash

i go out like a     flash   flash

i go out like a     flash   flash & diamond

i go out like a     ice

 

if the animus moves to venture its disposal

you should listen

with your good ear. you should

crack cap polypore. you should cling

to the tree

like you might

fall off

you should get real

convinced about something

 

allow me to reprise the preliminary causes:

i’m a bad hat

in my real clothes

i am one of those things i do for free

 

a woman watches a slideshow of her own life

in the big gym

on the recliner bike

 

if life gets treadless as a lollipop

then i’m bouncing on its slow machine

 

these are only the rules

but to follow them is a real

 

likelihood:

 

the world is a thin case and dimly, the what

you can see through it, hot

not doubt

 

bound up in the verity of its great clear walls

the fabulate act of their rising

 

they do no such thing but the fact of it

in a style so tender and suitable

 

o the heat is totally upwards. the heat is arriving balloon

 

ok

dear god i am making a true act

very corner

i am turning bleakly around it

is this

a verifiable practice

am i being the right way to ask this

     am i

 

delirious: to have jumped the furrow, joyed

i’m a wayward

annunciating

instrument

(the furrow instrument-joyed!)

passing to another density

whose ancestor occupies the floor

grooved like terrestrial paradise

 

goal:

i want to be so real

so complete you can know

all my predicates

i want you

to know all my predicates

 

through the completed trajectory of their arriving

o you see it is comprising

/doing it constantly

 

let’s be pleased by the scent of the yoke

coming on:

 

i swear it is so good it will delight you

 

someone needs to be brave enough

to go up and comfort the miracle

say soothing things like

      that the nation unit observe this day

      that the fountain water taste like a strawberry

    that there is no flaw in your particular lightness

 

habit:

i want to be changed just by being how not

 

are you laughing at my synonym

are you a habit take me out of the things i am

you can’t

tell the value of a thing

in terms of itself

example:   the day passes by

    recording its numerals

 

example: is there a thought

you could put in your mind

that would make it two

habit

you have to trust your body

to know what to do

 

        big animal down in its history rut

   scoring it out

coming to settle

my flesh on its sharp angles

 

love it

 

bitter wires as a tricked winter mooring

saying what it means like a lazy orbit

pouring up the rainstorm like an hour

lays its waste on the ground              enormous sounds

and what remains

 

i love myself most a moment ago

i love myself in the shapes i know

how to use:

 

habit, garment, vestment, clothes

woodchip super fortress

paradise

    & full of veins

take it nude and shoeless

in the spruces

bare as species

bear as silty clay that means

tested to the depth

of what do you accept

 

/teach me how to be a person

the moment i say

you see, you do what i want

 

to want

to make me that shape

what is it

made you instrument

 

what is it made you

start to use them

habit,

tell me   i don’t usually do this

 

it isn’t my house

traversing its zenith

the creature feeling traversed my south

 

o i know so much at the edge of my reach

it barks at me over the fence

 

 

 

KIRSTEN IHNS is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently a Ph.D. student and Neubauer Presidential Fellow at the University of Chicago, where she co-curates the emerging writer/artist interdisciplinary series Plexiglas, and reads poetry for Chicago Review. Her first book, sundaey, is forthcoming from Propeller Books in 2020, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hyperallergic, Black Warrior Review, DREGINALD, Bennington Review, Yalobusha Review, TAGVVERK, The Iowa Review, New Delta Review, Prelude, and elsewhere. She is from Atlanta, GA.