Issue 19: Adam Flint
A Decadeʼs Absence From The Family Album
I
As a threat, the way water-horsetail kingdoms are pilfered of form. Dusk the accomplice. Figmented sexes strained to over the marsh. The wind-gullied and root-lined dark packed with their sigh's deep resin. Soon a gust will flatten the twitch. Spread a shallow bedform. For one to rest in and rise from. At dew-point. Again.
II
Only flex an impulse and the matter bit. Dark green, hoarding rain, fanged the trapped and blunted. Pinked and puckered rips imagined tested how far hide blued. Or how much glut-space cells still had. Like a filling radiator, briar echoed rain. Hooks gurgled. Fat trickles under fist-skin ran (quiver-streams dusted with purple freckle rent blossom shed). Due to droplets. Eventually, the bored tortured gave up at another remove. Wrestled bramble snagged and sprang the morning.
III
Far off, off-white neared, went kind and ambered. Light set thick dipped in rhythm with the hills. In flutes haze carved. Behind the phoenix in ignorance. Music tumbling upwards.
IV
Leaf-bristle in the woodbed walked by. Each limned with cinder and the breeze spilling out. In the blinks of moss a fleeting shadow chilled their seta. Cold honed focus. Mustered laments. Distant trafficʼs arid sound flirted with the verge. Kerbs relented. Sudden darkness lash-widths scratched out itched in the cleared-for contact.
V
Understood later as a brock in a browʼs copse. Two, in fact, in Dorset. On raised elbows sight caught low shapes streaking down the lea. Double-double white stripes into the ripening dusk.
VI
Conveyance increasing green shape reflected in the clear. The tonal and dimensional donʼt stop bunched lap. By wind field-grass similarly rilled. And ground bent to its bigger part under one posed hazel. Clouds, meet to mouths and words, purpled and lemoned their stint.
VII
White nether-grass. Glossier rootward. Lashes part upon it. The unknown world is known to be above. Meanwhile, dark levels stump.
VIII
Slow cold clogged to presence the blood tread. Wrought pain erased from its purpose. All undertaken in hazing. Including the little sky-crouch ice-crunch, and, when thought of, head-bound air. Each breath befriended the brutal until hard cold rammed sternum. Small walls in small blue light blued for two blue hands to steady. A grim pallor asserted the cat-trot tripping up the shunned.
IX
Gradually, salmon-pink walls depressed for sleep to lean into. And leant sleep fitted like a cock in a fond cunt. Gloved at dock by the conjured warmth sunken such bolt-holes kept. What were questions hummed. Hints fleshed. Meat went on the beesʼ vibrato. Slowly, a slit mocked a dado, picked a makeshift horizon out. What could take took on shape. Voices soaked into the pile. Dying the carpet a quiet that a quiet violence stained. A shadow in the angle of fabric began the furnitureʼs function. One mouth-smelling slick shone against all odds and bagsied the paisley.
X
The dark slunk into another room. Curtains faced. Veil for slight light-seep. More like soft ink-bleed through blotting. How blue black. How rippled by deep net. Black walls trawled by blind scan till a glint informed on the dawn. Shoulder-blade in relation to the floor took form. Crumbage, the pileʼs fuzzed fibre caged, helped cut wakingʼs teeth. Grant dense touch. Issue the initand.
Antabuse
Less beetling of the dapple this far back beneath the trees
The hesitance of dark green
shadow solar islands graze
calms and further swallows land
as receding rem-sleep would
if what dreamt was light itself and deepened
No urgency
the sin in hand
no disturbance
save lean adolescent
tans cadging burn
traded for with anecdotes
lame
mendacious
A pressure to the top
tips exert
breaks the perforate sections
the crack made sates
the mind flurries
the pulse combusts
the maze-spool
a waft of apotheosis
(the sip is in
sip
id)
ought more world be
the echo the echo mourns
Suddenly nothing again
then without regard
outlines densen bracken pinnate
pattern appearing more reptilian
as the moments pass
as the moments panicked quicken
their little steps the face lakes red
breakneck heartrate white light sirened
litvit skinned and searing
a frozen sun
the salamander retina
the pit inside the beast that bides there
was a mirror surface so
thinned by constant introspection
as to be depthless enough for any
watching god
in dark retreat
a prisonerʼs cinema
or tulpa in the ganzfeld
begin again and grasp made space
out of willowherb a tortrix eats its way
to piece time of daylightʼs silence
the mirror in the empty room still warm
Collapsing Otherness In Loss
But now · harps turned to mourning
balance gone · without black sun · a
hunter's moon · downed and bruised in
earthscales · leaves as light · noctial milk
· the four dear phases · the only musick I
could live out the renamed days with
Adam Flint was born in North London and lives in Berlin. Previous poems have appeared in Sand, Shearsman Magazine, Black Box Manifold, The Internal Leg & Cutlery Preview (Critical Documents), among others; and, most recently, in Reliquiae #5 Supplement from Corbel Stone Press.
