1. TALK : PARALLAX

My jasmine desert plant doesn't flower!
I blame it.

Enclosed: the poem 'Wohin wir uns wenden im Gewitter
der Rosen,' she writes

- Do you know Baden Baden, Baden Baden?
- Pardon?
- Baden Baden

Among her biggest fans
is the mathematician;
that should come as
no surprise, his vertigo
when she plays Schoen-
berg's 'Transfigured
Night,' an early work re-
jected by the state opera,
while at the same time
employing her voice-off
technique from a small
apartment, instrumental-
izing the answering
machine so that her kept
recordings (for that is
what they are) come to
            resemble
the music, and the voice-
s inverted ninth chords,
impossible and heated,
indifferent to
violas warning them-
selves of themselves,
            ecstatically
turning
— yet vulnerable, ex-
posed, barely wet before
            dry in the
slight air as our room
is smaller and smaller,
impossible, heated. The
rearrangement of the
notes above the bass
into different octaves and
the doubling of notes is
known, we hear, as
voicing. They are then
pleased, very pleased.
And it is all one can do to
resist thinking, taking
            with certainty
devastated
pink I inhale. It is all I
can do to watch the sun
set and possess
strangers' transfigured
            'Again oh again
please, oh…' works to
put the planes back in
            the erotic scenes
scenes, quite
            Well, he said
such as when he looks
at her and wants to kiss
her, that's when a plane
            goes by

"and thus (the work)
cannot be performed
since one cannot perform
that which does not exist."

unzip to where I am before I was
seventh mode of love child thrown on the mantle

(arcade game whirring)
(no audible dialogue)
(carousel music continues)
she walks over to the Empress Motel office
in the room
checks herself out in the mirror
TV comes on
she sits on the edge of the bed
hockey game on
as if her hair's being pulled her neck backward in a stretch
and in one motion sighs, gets up
goes to the bathroom
(faucet running)
 

still buried in the pillow in astonishment
St. Lux day stream

for to stumble in the light with you

oh my gd …
Rethinking the
Politics of Pleasure

            she
overhears (him) through the wall
- Pardon?
-

2. DOWN A TREE-SHADED PATH

I didn't know which was the right thing to answer …
he was in the shadows, and pretty tall … because I
didn't know which was—how to survive, so!
I just told the truth, I said,
yes, I played Hamlet.

& he said what to this day is the best compliment
i've ever gotten after a performance, he said,
man, that was right off the street.

burnt myself on the baking rack last night, trying to protect
cherry pie with metal soul's whim, foil, and am
pathologizing this pink scar on my inner arm now, curling it
s crescent up and out as if to show you, as if night-visions
of parataxis or imaginary relation ever taught me anything
(wait) (hung from someone's inverted ladder) 'Niagara'
played on the radio, while we were at it!
      sort of devote grass-fed idea (normally reserved for
men's self-maintenance / she who swallows with gum
pockets after a surveillance may contain a misreading by
the printer and wake, a cat at night; I cannot sleep if one is
near, and though I'm sure I see those eyes, I'm not so sure
a body's there // but now that they are unwittingly killing
themselves in a bid to reasonably mow as in trim or
have maiden cushiness (but Al-anon. here let me
resurface like puer animus supports the body of
Patroclus), I'll … leave it out for you to see, to search
human-human combat, i think, or i narrativize (by being not
/ is), women fighting for their rights, to pay for the laser
scan of Acropolis Kore 678, for the sake of all humanity. a
call to put Franza in her dirty dress down on the bed for
the night if only she'd sit still and listen is something even i
wanted—her prone body resembling only itself, her inner
torment unseen, momentarily contained, his schnapps to
be sipped in odorless peace hardly far from her eyes shut,
trembling, see her passion sweat, undisrupted. but
temporarily go/ose down for the count. and so, if i'm
moving to place to place, i am diminished, i pick up my
clothes, i end bold in delude what with these all-over bodily
nerve endings / a raging I I wasn't; "imagine really
liberating sexuality from gender and inciting the senses out
of phallic armor" but realism must be much more detail-
saturated dear hommelette, and it's not sexuality to
liberate when "flashes" / "short breaths" disrupt my health,
sand is to re-sand, better than baby snot drips out non-
baby who, having escaped that very tiresome incline for
madness, seas simply piss and need more space on the
sidewalk in front of the storefront's dominant passion to
refuse, too, to learn my lines—golden i.e., age of tresses
cut and played upon the ground oer the bathroom scene
projected at our feet as if night-visions of parataxis or
imaginary relation ever taught me anything (wait) (is there
another level?) (shoreline) (pharmacy is downstairs)
(gentle) (look, i merely want to sit in the truck while you get
the mousse because thinking of you in there, i say out
loud, the view is as real) (no I'll go in too) shit
parentheticals no more earthbound have.

      slow to vilify too and … he didn't take into account the
scarcely conscious subject being insistent, did he, she
wrote! … wash the dishes with your hand softly at my ear
then i realize i'm thinking! (about butter no more, but about
what about soap) and i am a non-professional. which is to
say, singular. so and express finally in a minor key and
pink skirt my pink scars the limb plinth i am processing M.
Gaye's bookmarked nosegay of 'Masochistic Beauty' …
get down … shut up … get down, get up … then laughing
as i yawn while i come to (. mistranslated amply besotted
hood to be played upon by designing men with
antagonistic attitudes toward nature: 'They' have told me
nothing new (they's imagination and the world also? i can
barely reach, up on my tip-toes and hoping no one comes
in the glass hole through which i need to see her, but is
this blaming Andromeda for our rescue fantasies again or
perhaps place it on the painters, not a brush not spent).
she brought with her all the roles of the mythical woman
that she had played until now. the woman in that movie,
the woman in India Song … because she is an actress,
she represents all other women. by nature-photo, cries my
soul out a threatened (now extinct) oil-licked weak marine
bird's roped gaze a step toward me, another, almost
slipping on an acid folder, he seems hot, i am into it, but
also want ginger tea to save: “I have called you by name
and you are mine.” i shall call you Anti-idiocy Image. and in
you
I'll
      feel stupid double. "without a healthy ocean floor,
we'll all be dead."

pathetic and admirable; god, this book is good. 

BIT: affixed my seal to the flesh that is from here to the TV,
most inevitably if the body is a kind of surplus, over and
above its existence for others. serious surplus now, if you
know what i mean. in fact: the canopy held with the
peaceful condescension of someone who has rescued
was clucking, whistling my redundancy. after play hold 'em,
one is replaced with another (De Gaulle's fishing poles are
two baguettes glossed by a policy of grandeur and so
happiness enough for everyone is a solid reason; and
Varda caresses gently withheld sunflower—in the breeze
by the lake, disparate meadows of their sunny con-
doléances                   amiable, our powerlessness
under happiness's largesse's game of Magnum Rom-
eugenics, but I hate it, I hate it—Magnum is an actual
name by any other). an aeroplane brought nearer despite
propagandais of a who knows that endlessly comforts me,
dozing in quiet magic hours. love is not only superior to
being /// she rose to find keys. shipping containers stacked
sky-high, presently treed for human-human combat. the
question of being worth when confronted here to there
begs the other aspect for Va: the lover who improves even
in sincerely muting—for it's energy to believe in cliche
images, and i want to protect him for the rest of him letting
me. can light be spent? how could you ask such a thing?
when the work stops, i slow, as if said, to be true, that even
draped in lightness, stillness, autonomy (an impossibility at
this stage of my development and the genre i've chosen to
inhabit and the force with which i try to move, as if the
movement's lost the hand already), i am left with a
compounded who cares. a decorative sense thrown, an
Orpheus urn tra triage. Affordable Care acts to make one
word with, out of two, I am rent
            by
adding super to any one. superessential is to wait for the
sound amid id eels flailing like they see a dream out loud.
linguistically secure this fantasy: a white flower shows up
on my desk at the office as a figure of illuminating grace;
onscreen it floats less complex, easy; at the window, its
bells startle me into empathy; blown down the street in
impossibly fitting gust by my failing to obtain gravitation; at
my door, loquacious dysthymia, less tenses weeping
      while at the same time, linguistically secure this is—
think to write as if all react, there noone else—on? in
      blue eyes i'd b more optimistic for a
Xxxxxman to rock me, like my backbone was his own?
too body memory. want out of this tone, so I went to
sit on the bridge, climb out of bed, not out of love but
      where else—Marvin did, personally
experience the body. not an ultimate experience, a uh, in
other words, not a state humiliation—where all the forms
take place in it, as in the marine odor clinging to her
fingers fast in pursuit of vulnerability itself—
nope, didn't, of losing the war / ok take it out / punishing by
being not / is / while we put a clock in every take — how
      much more can one read in, how much
more can one
      take
the plane passes by … the plane passes by again … the
plane passes by … the plane passes by again ,,,
      i'll jam you 'til you faint,
you little saint
      i'll rock you 'til you're sore
forget that scene

I'd drown in this sea!

(Bachmann)

/// I'll

he was right. But we have still not gone far enough. It is
not enough to make the aeroplane pass by three times: we
must make it pass by twenty times.

CORINA COPP is the author of The Green Ray (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015). Recent writing can be found in Open House, Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically innovative writing by women in North America & the UK (Reality Street 2015), Cabinet, BOMB, and elsewhere. She is currently developing a three-part play inspired by the work of Marguerite Duras, The Whole Tragedy of the Inability to Love. Her performance work has been presented or is forthcoming at Artists Space, Home Alone 2 Gallery, Dixon Place, and through the support of LMCC. She lives in Brooklyn.