Issue 21: Maria Sledmere
Ariosos for Lavish Matter
1.
My self a disc I can’t compact. Instead relay anecdotes
about the cost of waitressing in several nocturnal
glistenings; remember it was Coleridge
who could not walk because of hot milk
so my shame is a migraine deprived of opiates
and mostly I unravel my uniform
steaming beneath the lindens.
2.
In profile much prettier, every epoch
has its scary techne. Dream where my mother
reapplies lipstick in the restaurant mirror
and my life is the tiniest violet smudge at the edge.
Customers fill the sepulchral dark as other shadows
tuned to mystery, clearly
in pain with better quality, keep warm.
3.
Resisting the hot mathematics of football
downward to HD and popcorn memories, hum
of love and bike wheels. Honeycomb crunched
in the back of my mouth like a birthday.
These splintering words
to be dressed and buried, most of human
and more. A scalp massage is tentacle pleasure.
4.
Shouldn’t we pick kin that resist us?
Dreadfully expensive, the wristwatch future
of light that lets in, silver fingers
threatening piano wires to whiter fire.
Tweets excepted, the lure of the bright
and Maytide familiar; remember he was
supposed to come play but didn’t and hurt.
5.
An empathic blue sky, little organ donation
around the rain. In the red, the muscular
cumulus news fell away. Meat that thins
without freezing. I don’t want to look
the way, this way. Cashing misery
for Mercury, cash in gin. Two cold halves
of a decent cut, fail to function as ritual.
6.
Hypothetical rhymes halo the bay,
become powder. How are we now.
The camera lifts the wax from your eyelids
startling a blankness of planetary lashes.
No sweet work of skin was sufficient,
those silhouette girls with faraway poses.
Switch off the desert, I’m not listening.
7.
Rub my eyes around the fantasy cedar
as if the sap stopped happening.
Hydraulic thought as all the rage
and wasting, most citizen damage
dismisses the winterized lanterns.
One line follows the next, a nest
curling up tight the language of saplings.
8.
In crispest best, street clover pales
to lilac assets; too true of an elevator birth
between ages. Starved in the dark
the poem’s gloaming is a hollow in the elm
of my belly, not to sprawl any longer
the vitamin lore of extroversion. I require
such luxury of inherited messages.
9.
So maybe Meredith’s hereditary spells
crested the gleaning sea’s chartreuse, reductress
of cool semesters. Exceptionally latent
the corridor of aesthetic residues
repainted a glorious yellow.
All premonitions ring with red:
a seagull eating a seagull.
10.
Interrupted outlook is late-night, tricyclic
opening your mailbox for ravens. Advertise
a fresh electronic duo, treat us confidentially:
our slick new remix made the radio.
This addiction can wait till Friday, as I add
to my nerves undigested iron. No condition.
Popping kelp didn’t help, am I yet shining.
11.
Halfway to Brunswick and back
in lossy compression of monochrome era. Missing
you much in abandoned houses, cloistered green.
Nothing a shake of desiccated opals won’t fix
when the sparkler goes, death as fizz and cravings.
Some sort of wartime cousin now a chocolatier
and I really don’t know what to say
ready salted with these read receipts.
12.
My womb through the night was shredding
to suffer the sheets as glass
and the body’s luminosity, I’d say
the wrought metallic twang of the tongue.
I pay for everything
and the recipe stays central
to rich boys, coke and brand new menus.
13.
Can I fetch you anything while I’m here?
How was it this time. The cervical curve
of bone at the brink of the plate, a balance
I exact as gravity. What sorts of eternity
do we choose for our labour?
I was so afraid of orange, poverty; your eyes
if they opened just so, like beautiful eggs.
14.
It didn’t take long to recreate
the opaque catatonia of sad hospitality; news of aniseed
drained the pool. No-one came.
Chalked up to biospheric sequence
and now receding. Is there bread with that.
I spent ten minutes sketching to change things.
Remember you can always sleep.
15.
Didn’t I say a dairy-free dream
would deliver me strange to some home or another.
When everything grew too green
and the smell of the bluebells
still deep in your neck like a song.
A sort of Gaussian moment propels me, lullaby ever
of red-berried February, the alkaloid.
16.
Coltan imbues each blade
of archival lust upon airplanes. A touch.
Some other pixelated dryad could tell
time from the web of a spider; my primary
accent dissolved as sand then ambient.
Each window of night became complicated,
pasteurised. I could not acquire the nascent tinder.
17.
Fluorescence rises from the woods
to a clearing of gilded tips, expiry dates, essays.
These demented lands where I love you
in the drafted webpage, a fractal
synapse unsampled. Our hours as baskets
of moulding fruit, glitching seeds. This can happen.
I like the loops of your voice, dust, the trivial starlings.
Maria Sledmere (@mariaxrose) is working towards a creative-critical DFA in Anthropocene aesthetics and the everyday at the University of Glasgow. She is a member of A+E Collective, Poetry and Nonfiction Editor at SPAM and SPAM Press, founding editor of Gilded Dirt and occasional music critic and collaborator.
Her work has been published in places including Adjacent Pineapple, Amberflora, Cumulus, Datableed, Erotoplasty, Former Cactus, From Glasgow to Saturn, The Glasgow Review of Books, Gutter, MAP Magazine, Numéro Cinq, Plumwood Mountain, Really System and Zarf. She blogs at musingsbymaria.wordpress.com.
Copyright © 2018 by Maria Sledmere, 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.
