Embedded Files
Past Tense
Another continent is found, which brings us to eight now.
We long for one walkable stretch, to reach one another.
The abandoned yacht has sunk further into the muck
of the once-Viking, once-Roman, once-
Brythonic, once once once once once once once once
once nonriver ghostly forest
once nonhuman nonlanguage ooze
once nonwhole inversion
of anything we might have ever known,
present-day river Ouse.
The abandoned yacht has sunk, or the water
has risen, rolling down from the ‘wild’ moors,
a wholly invented landscape, mind you,
dreamed up in smoke and mud.
Why do our maps mark forests that aren’t there?
The GIF in response depicts a long-haired child,
eating a peeled onion, raw and whole.
It’s understandable, you know, our quickness
to judgement, our minute calibration
of the possible, our settling for, our settling in,
the rack we made to hold our knives, and our resolve
to sweat the onion slowly, to bring its layers together
and let the flavours right down, sinking into sweet alchemy
down, down, down, down into heat
back to when our hands were wholly fused
to each other, ready to spark,
which was not all that long ago
but also unfathomably past
tense so I’m not sure what conditional phrase
to set up and how to get it running
on my tongue and
out from my mouth
and still breathe in
[Kimberly Campanello's most recent projects are MOTHERBABYHOME, a 796-page poetry-object and reader’s edition book (2019), and sorry that you were not moved (2022), an interactive digital poetry publication produced in collaboration with Christodoulos Makris and Fallow Media. She is a Markievicz Award co-recipient and has been awarded residencies at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, The Studios of Key West, and RAMDOM in Italy. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Leeds.]
Copyright © 2022 by Kimberly Campanello, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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