Denise Leto

RESPIRATORY

She is amphibious in the night, the unsparing graft of night
when the need to breathe crawls up a cavernous rib

scratching the salty rim of faux-death lips. Her lover
in the damp equilibrium dives and comes upward

not herself but a page and nowhere near the tide gasping
desire, curled hand rippling around the unfathomed margin

oracular, printed, flung, spit, heated, spun—
sickly words, words that pop underfoot, that drain

the coloratura asthmatic; wishful and inchoate.
Antonia builds a crayola sky to give her semblance

and exhalation. Still, Ian in wax, her mother in minus threadcount,
the car-shattered pelvic floor: on a gurney in the rain,

in the vitreous rain. Sit and watch the game. Root. She is an athlete
of ceilings, the wan exertion of moon, and under her lungs

guppy phonics, wanting in numinous fixity.

* * *

THE GREAT VOWEL SHIFT

The touch of an egg and the oval intuit.
My hands want that. A curve supple
and shaped to trust. An egg which remains
an egg through time, though, must certainly be
considered dead or at least locked in a form
unspent on birth. Egg in perpetuity. Petrified egg.
My hands frosted unloose and palmed. Together
they work with the new material. Slow to warm
up. Slow the way silence is a river away and the body
always in both.

Language is one shape of silence the way
breathing in and out is a form that just happens
until it doesn't. A clay that used to be hard, we make soft,
mold, and harden again in a fire hot enough to make
it something else. Ceramic. Breakable.
There are six kinds of loneliness. I know only one.

What a sundial, this organism. Look how it points
to shadow the compelling circle in angles. Always
the upright pen scratching to get down what's on
the other side of it. Thought thinking. A journal
is a plaza of surrender and gossip. Mine wears a fedora
and smokes thin cigars in a port side town. If it could swim
it would be syllabi. At the altar of the utterly unsayable
giddily secular and fugitive, the bow to it. And the
Great Vowel Shift: yet the orthography remained the same.
Dead pendulum in the median.

Though this is not a history. I can no more tell you about sound
than untell. In the middle way, there is no reference point.
The mind with no reference does not resolve itself,
does not fixate or grasp. What was I saying? The slow,
oscillatory sway away and the silence toward—

* * *

(in the center of the brain there is no you)

A year in the envelope with a new font
surrendering. The mouth of the apartment
screamed absent mindedly; legs spit out
as the result of a forceful motion to the head.
Then: A horse on a book in the rain feints
the surface. Can you forget if it's not
a memory? Hush. Don't tell the amygdala.
She lives in an instance of this. To overrun
or inhabit. In the book about a horse trying
to get in. The preternatural itinerary of fatigue.
At the surface to fix firmly in mind a yellow
gathering sibilant bed. The grid undoes her.
It's a kind of non-self, genius stich-stichery.
A parallel threaded network if one tiny wire severs.

Denise Leto is a poet and Senior Editor at the University of California, Berkeley. A collaborative chapbook, Waveform, written with Amber DiPietra is now out from Kenning Editions. Her poetry and reviews have appeared in Puerto del Sol, Beauty is a Verb, Cinco Puntos Press; Somatic Engagement, Chain Link Book Series; Wildhorses on Fire: Other Letters; The Wolf Magazine, Arts Council of England; Aufgabe; 26; Xantippe; and MELUS: The Journal for the Society of Multi-Ethnic Literature in the US. She was guest editor for the journal Sinister Wisdom and co-founder of Three Guineas Press. She was a past Honorary Fellow and Artist in Residence at Djerassi Resident Artist Program and a Fellow for the University of Michigan's Research and Practice Symposium on Movement, Somatics and Writing. Among other projects she is currently working on a docu-book, Day Jobs: What Poets, Writers, Artists, and Dancers Do for Living. She moves through the world with the neurological muscle/voice disorder, dystonia.