Karen Faris
On Moving
I thought I would sell them off
one by one,
after careful consideration
of my relevance
to each yellow, brittle page
immersed in the smell
of this transcendental cloud of dust,
the must of older things,
the must not
of first edition selves,
mysteries held together
by only the crack of a spine
and just like my vertebrae
no longer hold
the same shape straight,
they no longer promise
a story not yet told
no longer waiting
for the pages to unfold
as they turning in
and into themselves
with the weight
of accumulation
A Fistful of Planet
Here,
take my soul.
Hold it for a while
to see if we are suited
for we are together here
despite there being
no planetary agreement
in this corner of the universe.
Feel my heart beating.
Feel the words I’ve only imagined
appearing before you,
a lattice of lace
thriftily sewn, the scrap
and tangle of vines
climbing out of the cold
slowly leafing out
from deep inside the last ice age.
There are flowers too!
I made them just for you!
Hold us all there
in the light, the exhale
of your sugared breath
tingling through prisms
as you extract my sighs
of escape.
Here, take these,
my signs,
of life
of love
of what was once youth,
full of beauty and expectation
combined now with the photosynthesis
of disappointment of yet another world disgraced,
this tangled mess of greening and yellowing,
blooms cut down and cast out for a dime
summoning time and place into motion.
Larry’s Poem
I keep writing your obituary
over and over as if saying the words
ahead of time, before their time
will stay the act of becoming
or in your case, unbecoming
which is what happens,
slowly as the states of matter argue
over a bit of gas here,
solids to liquids there.
The body hones its own rules
in a play of absurdist witticisms
of Wittgenstein proportions
(we argue if a chair is a chair
if there’s no one there to sit in it
and name it your chair,)
this, all amid Einsteinesque infinities
of elemental matters
(who will get the biggest piece of pie
if you aren’t there to claim your constant)
in a parody of who we all used to be
father
daughter
sister
that one still exists
even if
she knows nothing of Descartes and only of dessert,
and mother, who claims she doesn’t understand a word of this
and would I rewrite it for her.
Oh mother,
must you always want the last word
even when you have outlived us
with your magical thinking
keeping to the obit’s original story
printed in the newspaper now,
of how he swept you off your feet
and gave you two jewels.
Karen Faris works across the artistic spectrum and creates in order to escape the constraints of gravity. Whether she is making visual art, fabric, or performance art, words remain her constant in this rapidly changing world as she argues for a better, kinder, more compassionate planet. She lives in Rochester, NY where she continues to dream up new projects. She has published the art + words chapbooks Florine! Oh Florine! and The Death of Compassion (aaduna, 2019). Her poetry based Aliens Like Us was in the 2019 Rochester Fringe Festival and she has a growing fondness for art in unexpected spaces such as her recent pop up art installation “Like the Last Woods in the World,” at Tinker Park in Rochester, NY.
