Issue 25: Jiaoyang Cole and Sonja
Intersession of Sonja
Watermark
Reaching starwise to confirm the electrical meridian
the countrymen are waiting for Sonja’s nectar
wept into their poultry hands cues are estranged
from the language of zenith the cyber-flame landed
little zeniths merely as street lamps:
snowcovered with untouchable silk
Session one [PSI]
I would be fixated on figure skating if Sonja were the skater.
A skater can reverse gravity.
A skater scribbles my name onto the melt earth-cream.
A skater splits days.
A skater ignites fish as matches.
A skater hoists the flags of nothingness.
Who is the skater? The skater is a counter-clockwise watch, a flying lamb, fleeing from my palms and returning between my eyelashes. Sonja, my skater, is time itself.
Session One [Prism]
Had the hound not wandered solo as a moon.
Had the goose not wobbled into the institution.
My Sonja, my festival, my timber long and covetous.
Not all starlings circle god.
Not all vibrant sheathes stashed in the cradle-box for a midnight performance.
A prism panting across hemispheres of opals.
Why be reasonable Vladimir?! Why listen to the gods of gods of gods?
For the dogs of gods glimmer in the memory of triangular myth.
Return to the field of the satisfied saturn-rose.
Salty spearhead witch crab of canopies scratching at the sky’s inner thigh.
All porous poppies grandfathered in under the umbrella theory.
A platform shoe upholds the Sorbonne's clay bird.
A wicker bench to plop the body under. A fig or a lizard's frail heart?
Alas, all the Cezannes of psychiatry fell asleep.
All my days prickled light.
Hey Sonja, what pixelated eye is this?
Session One [Shadow]
When I see kids with magnifying glasses in the bush
I know, they too, are looking for Sonja:
newly grown Sonja or elderly Sonja
inked as sky-stained algae floating in the pond.
Sonja, Sonja, the insomnia language spoken by the unborn.
She is a night willow herb, a forever receptacle stashing tumultuous scums.
I know. I know.
Sometimes I am part of the scums.
Sometimes I am the arc of the magnifying glass.
When I sneeze and flush my own shadow in the pond
I know I have overdosed on her hair
with my throat tightening as a garbage disposal
I snuff the nectar of the night.
Session One [Cathexis]
In repose
Sonja is trained on a magnifying aliveness
Burnt moss spores arc through the woes
Slice-pooling the maker’s eye
Trout knitting spines for her coat
Excessive excessive water
Clear on all sides
Session One [Fire]
The night is not a whodunit scented epistle.
Sonja, she is still that dim parlor I like.
Not in the titular socle, not from the antiphonal percussion.
That which unspools me piscines me in an extravagant bleakness.
Reeds, reeds, the flagellated whimsey.
Why are you continuing twittering in my lycanthropic pocket?
As pocket turns into a heart without turnstiles
we traverse without asking for permission.
The normalcy of pomegranate should not count us.
Session One [Moon Rock]
Voluptuous villagers squat on the plumes of day beak. Murmuring sherbet saliva slithers over Sonja’s yawning. Piles of soil of history wetted within the pelvis of a wheelbarrow. An arm whittled out of ivory bark extends its sticky tentacle into a barnacled poem. Some cultures consider thespians of greening eyes fit for tea under the swanny swanny moon. O lamplit lady of the axolotl rose. O sweet alpine melody strung by the blue ox sweeping under a fluorescent pupil. Shells cast to the swaying cloth of weeds brushed by the minty breath of the north. Not a duck about at dawn as the prostitutes roll pickled toucans up their skirts. Five eagles in a tree that era the shirt blew across swallowed sightless linen lollipopping loons allowing for sun support. My dog, my crispy red blood luscious lubricated strands of reeds cloaked over a deviled monk. Hand me a bowl of sterilized pig dreams for the atmosphere of evening to commence. A Sonja as impromptu as toe twang strung by my smoking smothering Sir.
Session One [Antiwater]
Wish I may wish I might
live in the calendar and fan with oars?
You said oars are pregnant with arrows.
Arrows to where? Arrows for whom?*
Sonja’s capillary and her inner forest
burning in the mouths open as a thousand blank windows
the beseeching staccatos move then stop in a trance.
I wish I were the only countryman in that collapsed hovel
who is slightly bored with nighty nectar for a whole summer.
Session One [Repetition Compulsion]
I can train some Sonjas to avoid other Sonjas:
the magnifying glass barefoot
on fire for this endless carnival
It’s not the peacock lamp we follow
nor the oars that fan us into the new woods
but cross-legged breathing
through fresh/dry pinpricks
Two skaters holding hands like scissors
stealing music on the pier to be thrown into the sea of coats
after editing the body reclining in the blow-up
After a thousand terrifying fig bites
force confession, a pattern dehydrated
in dry ice, we cannot cope with our witness
Session one [Saliva]
between the greeny crunchy typhoons, between the secure sections of Sonjaism
between the song is jickjacking & jigsawing our elbows we can not lick
between elbows, forks, butterflies and hairpins
between silence and screaming, plop body and saturn rose
our gropings are not here for nothing
Session one [Sublimation]
each tendril after
a different ghost
branding the wall
with shadow
bribe the gas man Sonja
so we can take it further
along caked-up coordinates
she limes the wall
from the figurine
to here
from figure to rhizome flutter
leaning beyond
canker weights
bottles of firestarter
for the wild parch
in-house essence
of tarantula
Steam
Crescent rib of splintered road old (women) scattering blind feet upon encountering a stray Sonja. (Citizens) of the wounded stone cast to biblical waters, frail as a bag of bones she presses its head, hands webbed in vascular bundles of blue crossings, canine cranium against her weepy tit, suckling the aerial canopy of bile pearls. All mothering is erotic. Have you ever soaped the ankles of (a dying man)? Have you ever dabbed an abdomen with a wet cloth your (dog) body intertwining with their body as though you were an antique vine or a communist weed? The mothering body is the collective body united under the genitals of care, as in the dream of the unified spleen, or a hill of dandelions sprouting in the tentative ear. And yet, how easily a body can be weaponized, how tender a tendril of wet animal crouching between (my mother)'s legs. The stars are alert nipples from which golden yellow diamonds drip onto the heads
of (bishops).
Notes
*Shoe-sifter, snail-wifter hypnotized by the egg’s coffin grunt.
Sonjaism: a study on women, dog, citizens, a dying man, my mother, and bishops, or the opposite of all of them. Sonja, a sonar, a sonata, a somber socrates.
We seldom ask how we are surviving, from a session to the next.
Is the vagus nerve tickled by this mammalian monastery? Cups of Buddha’s eyebrow sown into the morning’s budding bra.
Jiaoyang Cole and Sonja are three poets/artist/performers/friends who met in New York City where they went to grad school (NYU and Brooklyn college). They co-edit a lit/art magazine together: cclliipp.com.
Copyright © 2021 by Jiaoyang Cole and Sonja, 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.
