Carleen Tibbetts
Poems after and for Lyn Hejinian
a color, a succulence
your delusions are all in bloom/your body replaced by a perverse series of gestures/I want to learn how to choose my neglect, my personal shimmer/numbers don’t keep anyone safe/to certain futures I don’t mind saying goodbye/oh the utopia of no/a hungry, stalking thing/the soft terror of information/even in sleep, the future pursues you/a name exists forever, even if you’re dead
kissing the pink
when a familiar melody revealed itself, I had to leave/I walked forward in the problematic
garment/whose little self are you?/loving in an injured place/scar/city/sick ice/the low moan that currency makes against the world/we love the future because we believe it will be ours/pain is so close to pleasure/the burnt fringes hissing at the edges
to read a text is to ravish it
greensward/a utopia of no/soft terror of information/the solitary cell of I/galvanized solar immensities/a new gravity will come/the moon’s victim cannot perjure itself/love is a wild-eyed killer/a molten ethics/the sexed light goes out/stylized fables/parenthetical decency/a held universe/freed into the sky
Carleen Tibbetts is the author of dossier for the postverbal (Carrion Bloom Books, 2023), DATACLYSM.jpg (White Stag, 2018) and the chapbooks DATACLYSM.jpg (Radioactive Moat, 2017) and to exosk(elle), the last sugar (Zoo Cake, 2015). Her work has appeared in The Pinch, Sink, jubilat, DREGINALD, Datableed, Hot Pink, Forklift Ohio, The Laurel Review, and many other publications.