Laurie Price
THIS LANGUAGE YOU KNOW
What if the energy to explain
something understood by an
iconoclast’s position is
where it’s put, there? And see,
when a jawbone arrives from Padua –
a sacred relic to remember us back
to nascent luminosity, unbidden,
different from faith-embraced clusters
sans context, then what?
Do you finally command all that’s given?
Would it be prescient to consider each
possibility now that we know how
so much isn’t known?
Does science with its grammatical
vocabularies trump the barometers
of social integration? This language
that’s mine could be yours, too, you know.
Unstick its rigidities and replace them
with what cracks you, shatters you
to begin from some other state. Then a smile
might reach out and up to surprise the self
you thought you were to launch again.
NOW
Everything now
The life list
parachutes to
a different (wo)man
on the inside
Beyond goodbye
Castaway diva
My sister Gail
recommends films
and series titles
from her bed
in Brooklyn.
We agree on a few.
I said watch
The Mauritanian
and spelled it out.
She later agreed:
Lovely tale
scenery, camerawork.
I lived there
not exactly
there, but
there I said
when I tried to
renounce the world
in my sadness
for her lost
capacities.
Movement
in both arms
both legs
and torso
abandoned her
over time, on & off
until it was final.
Now she’s
ascended
what ever
was; everything.
Yet, she feels joy
just breathing.
First eyes awake
in the dark.
Shadows dance,
and later music,
stories, films,
series fill her head.
Mexican papel picado
rings her room with
corazones de milagritos
and her art or mine
or an image
she asked to be
cut from a card
cover newly painted walls
brushed in tones she loves.
I want to accurately
hone in on what’s
remarkable. She.
In the center, in bed.
She, happy to be alive
to draw breath,
watch, listen, be.
Laurie Price is a poet and visual artist. She was in the first graduating class at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 1981. Her most recent book is These Pages Once Were Skin (Spuyten Duyvil 2024). Her other books include Except for Memory (Pantograph Press 1993) and Radio at Night: Recent and Selected Work (Lunar Chandelier Press 2013). After receiving a grant from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, in 1993, she moved to Oaxaca, Mexico. Since then she’s lived in NYC, Morocco, Spain and as of 2013, she returned to Oaxaca where she now lives. laurie-price.com
