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.