Featured poet H.V. Cramond, a Chicago-based writer and educator, is the Poetry Editor for Requited Journal (www.requitedjournal.com). She has recent work in Keep Going, Wunderkammer and Ignavia.
Breath/Fall
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I.
suppose disposal Middle English, from Anglo French desposer,
from Latin disponere to arrange
weakly response recycle women
is the bathroom this way
to put in place
carpet trim recycling lock set in readiness
think before you throw think arrange
to transfer to the control of another
a basket of print to deal with the matter conclusively
may include
weight gain or certain cancers
increase or decrease in acne
vomiting depression
take them out of their original containers
headaches mix them with an undesirable substance mix
vaginal infections
high blood pressure
such as kitty litter
blood clots in legs lungs heart or brain
stroke loss of libido make them less appealing
liver tumors (rare)
dizziness heart attacks people may intentionally
gallstones go through your trash
cup with this is this a sponge Voluntary doubt about the faith disregards
or refuses to hold as true
cal, I saw you hanging crooked and I knew anxiety aroused by its obscurity
you understood recycling
only with approval from sun cancer cancer cancer
a little pester composted
reserved towing enforced if deliberately cultivated,
signs side left skin illegible doubt can lead to spiritual
loss of libido blood clot
caw caw caw
i’m trying to caw ca
every mother is a working caw compost
and when he had opened the fourth seal
I heard the voice of the fourth beast say
flat irons and waves permanent come and see and I looked and
behold a pale horse
excuse me are you doing the parking
Is your cabinet filled with expired drugs
or medication you no longer use
I don’t have the caw And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with
animal mother bike fleet
the beasts of the earth
beached on a bench in the
sunday there’s a bee over here composting
but then again the question is
you know what I mean and also bless you
difficulty and avert your eyes definitely a good mourning experience
and why is my left heel
read your book stop looking at me
limping limping throw away
can I spit in those plants
her prettiness marks her
let me ask you
no Buddhist stepped forward to take her place the signs of female aging as diseased
and who shall be able to stand
II. When any of us here speak by the power of the Spirit we say better what he would say if he were here in person.
- Lines and Wrinkles
lines trace her thought in a precise calligraphy a lifetime of kissing even as a fig tree casteth
her untimely figs when she is shaken of a mighty wind.
2. Uneven Skin Texture
and the kings of the earth and the great men and the rich men and the chief captains and the mighty men and every bondman and every free man hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountain
3. Uneven Skin Tone
throughout the ages there have been so-called private revelations some of which have been recognized by the authority of the Church they do not belong however to the deposit of faith
4. Appearance of Pores
Decreta Dogmatica Councilii Tridentini: Sess VI
Bellarmine, De Justificatione
Judicium de Libro Concordantia Lutheranorum
Liguori, The History of Heresies
5. Blotches and Age Spots
and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair
6. Dry Skin
at best this is a false prophecy at worst it is an out and out lie Gospel Jesus does not lie because he is the Truth neither is he mistaken
7. Dullness
I have sought and do now seek that my words will be true and wise and proper
III.
and when he had opened the third seal I heard the third beast say come and see and I behold and lo to a black horse and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand
below hollow is a root
straight lines in dirt
between spaces
fingered and sticking and I heard a voice in the midst of the four
beasts say
dark bass through trees
pillow pulsing
an invading drone of structure a measure of wheat for a penny and three measures of barley for a penny and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine
flat board thin mattress racked
skeleton and moths beating the word Lepidoptera from the Latin word for scaly wing
themselves against a tin roof Lepidos meaning scale pteron meaning wing shingles on roof
baking illumination semi-arid areas where breeding seasons are short
looming womb demystified a proboscis is used to drink nectar
tide submission to mission permission
to leave to grieve to feel something
to be wrong
Perhaps its origins are related to Old English
darkness like light fighting light “maða” meaning maggot or from the root of midge
tight brightness group
which until the 16th century was used
vision sounds sour mostly to indicate the larva
ours not mine no mining usually in reference to devouring clothes
dancing on fancy
clothes and holy trinkets to identify you will need to look at all the colors
IV.
| Katie, breathing steadily | Rebecca | Nina, breathing erratically | |
| (in) (out) | |||
| mine is a terror of breath | (in)(out) | ||
| breath tearing at mind | (in)(out) | mine is a terror of breath | (in) (in) (ouuut) |
| mine inspired spirals of | (in)(out) | respiration spiraling mind | (in)(out) |
| respiration spiraling mind | (in)(out) | of terror of mind my terror | (in)(out) |
| of terror of mind my terror | (in)(out) | (in)(out) | |
| tearing my mind breathing breath | (in)(out) | mining my mind spirals terror | (in)(out) |
| mining terror my mind spirals | (in)(out) | timing blindness blinding | (in)(out) |
| inside of blindess timing mind | (in)(out) | terrorist | |
| terrorist ist mein ist dein ist sein | (in)(out) | (in)(out)(in)(out) | |
| ist ein ist kein ist kind ist | (in)(out) | ist mein ist dein ist sein | (in) (in) (ouuut) |
| kindling ser sind and int-eruption | (in)(out) | ist ein ist kein is kind | |
| of terror of fervor of devotion | (in)(out) | is grinding is feel is finding | (in) (ouuuuuuut)(in)(in) |
| of kind of spirals and spirals | (in)(out) | finding time feeling fine | |
| of mind breathing breath | (in)(out) | really really I’m fine | |
| breeding death and in-sects in sex | (in)(out) | it’s just that I | |
| I breathe I breathe I breathe | (in)(out) | keep breathing and breathing | in) (ouuuuuuut)(in)(in) |
| to fear is weakness weep weakness | (in)(out) | weep weakness weep breathing | |
| pique weakness pique peaking | (in)(out) | (in)(out)(in)(out) | |
| weak breath I breathe I breathe | (in)(out) | (in) (in) (ouuut) | |
| (in) out) | (in) (in) (ouuut) | ||
| I breathe | (in)(sigh) | (in) (in) (ouuut) |
this is false
utterly totally and completely
there is not one sliver of truth in it
V.
| that is not it’s primary intended infectiondefect detect rejection | deny resource limitsbusiness and religion
the business of religion |
| a pill, as Clomid. injections, such as Repronex, Follistim, Pergonal, Repronex, and Gonal-F. In general, the injectible reject detection | scientists mount the public stage and identify |
| the risk of multiple birthsmultiple births and multiple pregnancies
multiple inherent risks should be disused discussed multiple should be disgusting |
to feed 6.3 billion persons,increasing at close to 90 million per year,
it is not their role to improve or complete definitive revelation |
| hostile cervical mucousuterine bleeding
ovulation that are not interrupted |
God nor greedintolerant of dissent |
| intolerant | |
| in somewhere around half of casesin around 10 to 14 percent
less than two percent these are the most common |
|
| how to discernA Text Book of the History of Doctrines | |
and I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal and lo there was a great earthquake and the moon became as blood and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth and the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together and every mountain and island were moved out of their places
fall on us for the great day of wrath is come
fall on The Wanderings of the Human Intellect
fall on A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist
fall on A Text Book of the History of Doctrines
fall
fall
fall
a conversation between HV Cramon and our guest editor:
[note: ideas here introduced do not necessarily reflect that of Soundless Poetry]
SP: Your poem is so amazing, thanks so much for sending that- how long have you been working on it?
HVC: oh, no problem. I actually wrote most of it while at Naropa in a pretty concentrated effort and then spent a few days when I got home. I don’t usually work that way– I usually write for an hour or two and then come back to a project later, but this was 3 hours a day, 5 days in a row, with nothing else really going on besides reading and talking about writing.
SP: Wow, that’s intense. So would you say that the poem is partially a description of a certain type of headspace? I’d like to hear more about how that connects with the issues that you are dealing with in this piece.
HVC: I think intense is a good word–I’d just come out of a weekend meditation retreat in the Rockies, and I was staying in a hut that had no electricity or water, and I got a migraine and had to miss a lot of the activities. So I was thinking about women’s embodiment, and how academic feminists tend to shy away from body issues, and how some of my writing has tended to come from an intellectual place. With this poem, I was trying to explore the breath as a fundamental unit of sound. Then I wound up thinking about the medicalization of women’s aging and fertility.Anne Waldman wrote an essay that’s in her book Vow to Poetry about “hag consciousness.” I was thinking that we should celebrate women’s release from all of the bullshit that comes with being attractive and having babies.
SP: I really enjoyed how each section is in a different format, and I think that is much like how we move through different stages in our lives… and women have particular biological stages that they go through, but these have been complicated and exploited by social perceptions of what women should be.
HVC: Right– that was another issue that came up. In the workshop we were reading Blake and talking about –what’s the name–in the garden of love.
SP: I think that by taking the initiative to create a kind of counter-exploitation with language turns that kind of repressive framework back on itself.
HVC: And I was thinking of perceptions of women as a kind of dogma similar to that of churches, of pharmaceutical companies holding court in our minds.
SP: (Which you do by making very obvious section breaks and choosing very different ways of using language to explore this idea.) Wow, absolutely. I like how we are writing at the same time on gchat.
HVC: I was looking a lot of websites for fertility drugs and contraception, and the side effects lists are AMAZING, and they’re so blasé about rattling them off. Some of the other place I found language were sites that explained how to compost, some catholic anti-heresy websites and the king james bible (revelations).
SP: I’m working with a nursing student right now (ESL) who wrote a paper on induction of labor. Apparently there has been a dangerous rise in the instances of induced labor. It makes me think that the control that society expects to have over women’s lives and bodies has infiltrated women’s own conceptions of their own control.
HVC: There’s also been a rise in C sections. My friend who’s a doula could tell you about how women (but more importantly their doctors) want to schedule births. They are uncomfortable with anything spontaneous and messy.
SP: This is sort of a speculation, but I think that the whole process of giving birth is one of the messiest things (besides war) that evolution has currently left us with and in our desire to live in a safe society we’ve decided that we have to control everything
HVC: Right.
SP: And pain is a really hard thing for people to deal with.
HVC: C-sections are lower risk for the doctor, higher risk for the mother.
SP: I’m very suspicious of this whole “due date” thing.
HVC: I got off the pill about 2 years ago, after being on since I was 16, and I had a violent reaction. Puking, periods every two weeks, etc. But when I had cleared it out, wow, did I feel great. A little bit like having the emotions of a 17 year old, but the pill I was on was designed to help you be Mr. Roboto.
SP: Oh damn. To maybe bring this conversation full circle, how do you think that all of these personal feelings contributed to the form and use of langauge in “breath_fall”?
HVC: I think that the use of language came from the impulse to be free of intrusion, both mentally and physically, but even in a pretty clear state, you’re made of your environment. I don’t own a TV, but yet I know who each Kardashian sister is because of the people around me. You can’t help absorbing the culture, the language, the seven signs of aging. The language too really developed some of the ideational content. I’d play with something that sounded like what I had just written and create something new. I’m not sure what that has to do with birth. The section that involves breathing (4 columns) has more to do with pranayama and my insane ideas about suffocation, but it could be viewed as a birth, certainly.
soundless 