<div class="line">If we must speak of each other, let it be</div>
<div class="line">in the forms that monarchs and generals use</div>
<div class="line">to refer to their rivals, as if each were known</div>
<div class="line">to the other only through field reports</div>
<div class="line">and classified intelligences. Let it be</div>
<div class="line">in tones of wariness, grudging respect, and,</div>
<div class="line">where permitted, mutual admiration.</div>
<div class="line">Let our campaign be conducted on these terms.</div>
<div class="line">And when people speak of the &#8220;break-up,&#8221;</div>
<div class="line">let us hear in that the cold overtones</div>
<div class="line">of the word as applied to a glacier: how,</div>
<div class="line">when the ice began to shudder and crack,</div>
<div class="line">new light found an entry, and the patterns,</div>
<div class="line">evolving each moment, each moment formed</div>
<div class="line">something lovely and fresh—a lens through which</div>
<div class="line">a bright, eerie world not previously known</div>
<div class="line">offered itself to be glimpsed—as the fragments,</div>
<div class="line">the small frozen fragments, mindless and free,</div>
<div class="line">tasting a life more open and salty</div>
<div class="line">than any that they had known, made their way,</div>
<div class="line">their steady, grim way, their cruel, ineluctable way</div>
<div class="line">toward that sea, that vast,</div>
<div class="line">that insensate, that insatiable sea.</div><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/JollimoreAfter.mp3"></audio></figure>

Merchant Culture

Silences

After

<div class="line">I don’t love you anymore.</div>
<div class="line">I’ve been working on learning to love myself.</div>
<div class="line">My therapist is helping me with this.</div>
<div class="line">Also, I’m in love with my therapist.</div>
<div class="line">Her method includes wearing a very short skirt</div>
<div class="line">and sitting with her legs apart</div>
<div class="line">while we talk about my unreasonable childhood,</div>
<div class="line">the friends who betrayed me, the various pets</div>
<div class="line">that mocked me and abandoned me.</div>
<div class="line">I don’t want to live forever anymore,</div>
<div class="line">only until the next Super Bowl,</div>
<div class="line">which is when my subscription to <i>Cat Fancy</i> expires.</div>
<div class="line">I no longer want to own things, I want them</div>
<div class="line">to stream through the universe like spirits,</div>
<div class="line">immaterial invisible rainbows</div>
<div class="line">that live everywhere and nowhere all at once.</div>
<div class="line">I no longer want to write the Great American Novel,</div>
<div class="line">or the pretty good Canadian essay,</div>
<div class="line">or the tolerable Norwegian short short story,</div>
<div class="line">or the shitty haiku of unknown nationality.</div>
<div class="line">I’d just like to write a decent suicide note.</div>
<div class="line">My last attempt read <i>Don’t forget</i></div>
<div class="line"><i>to feed Snuffy</i>, which hit more or less the right tone</div>
<div class="line">but wasn’t quite pithy enough to make it into</div>
<div class="line"><i>Best American Suicide Notes 2017</i>.</div>
<div class="line">I hear they’re developing a bomb</div>
<div class="line">that disappears the people completely but leaves</div>
<div class="line">the UPC codes intact. I hear</div>
<div class="line">the new administration is going to replace</div>
<div class="line">the sky with a massive flat screen TV.</div>
<div class="line">I just hope that we can all agree</div>
<div class="line">on what we want to watch.</div><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/JollimoreUpgrades.mp3"></audio></figure>

MEARCSTAPA

She Was Laughing into Her Mashed Potatoes

Upgrades

<p class="epil"><em> Sooner or later everyone needs a haircut.<br />
—Ed Crane, The Man Who Wasn’t There</em></p>
<div class="line"><span style="text-indent: -1em;">The note of longing that creeps into the voice</span></div>
<div class="line">of the woman who cuts my hair when she says</div>
<div class="line">“Oh, it was <i>amazing</i>”—she is speaking of the time</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">she was twenty-one and went for a week-long cruise</div>
<div class="line">around the Virgin Islands on a friend’s sailboat—</div>
<div class="line">is so heartfelt, so hushed,</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">so purely human that it makes me wonder</div>
<div class="line">what parts of the story she is leaving out,</div>
<div class="line">what she isn’t saying, which suspends itself,</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">as the unsaid always does, like a shadow or aura</div>
<div class="line">over the words she has allowed herself to say.</div>
<div class="line">Meanwhile her scissors sing the snip snip snip</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">of revision, and small seed-packets of my hair</div>
<div class="line">are drifting to the floor as if through humid forest</div>
<div class="line">air. As always I have let it grow too long</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">and have come in looking like a middle-aged professor</div>
<div class="line">of philosophy who is trying to look a little</div>
<div class="line">like Roger Daltry, or if he’s lucky, Robert Plant—</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">a gesture, perhaps, toward the life I get to live</div>
<div class="line">in the alternative plotline, the deleted scenes</div>
<div class="line">hidden in my life’s Special Edition DVD.</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line2">* * *</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">Desire is always a hazardous thing</div>
<div class="line">to reveal. That bold, slightly unfed look</div>
<div class="line">you direct without intending to toward a stranger</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">you suddenly want—does she remind you of your mother,</div>
<div class="line">or your first girlfriend, or does she represent</div>
<div class="line">the possibility of an alternate life,</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">one very much like this one in all the ways that matter,</div>
<div class="line">but deeper, more pure?—either risks breaking apart</div>
<div class="line">the social fabric, or else, if only we could see it,</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">it is the very glue that binds the social fabric</div>
<div class="line">together. <i>Thread</i> being, perhaps, in this context,</div>
<div class="line">a slightly more appropriate metaphor than glue.</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line2">* * *</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">Never having been to the Virgin Islands,</div>
<div class="line">having been twenty-one, having experienced</div>
<div class="line">unfulfilled longing, never having been a woman,</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">I am able partly, but only partly,</div>
<div class="line">to imagine what she is feeling, as she</div>
<div class="line">herself, perhaps, is forced in large part to imagine</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">the things her younger self used to feel—</div>
<div class="line">memory being, according to its very nature,</div>
<div class="line">fragmented and incomplete, edited</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">very much in the way that film is put together:</div>
<div class="line">jump cuts, dissolves, montages, eyeline matching,</div>
<div class="line">flashbacks and flash-forwards, all to tell the story.</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">Hence the tearstained and wistful delicious twin pleasures</div>
<div class="line">of imagining and remembering, the flickering beam</div>
<div class="line">of light emanating from somewhere behind you</div>
<div></div>
<div class="line">and the shadows it gives life to, the murmur of the huddled</div>
<div class="line">breathing bodies all around you, the encompassing dark</div>
<div class="line">that inhales and embraces, that exhales and resolves.</div>


Cardiac Concussion with Delay

The Gun in its Holster

Cutting Room

<div class="line">Years from now he’ll remember the months he spent</div>
<div class="line">trying to unlock a lock of her hair</div>
<div class="line">and how, when she kissed him, he felt like a poem</div>
<div class="line">being translated from one language into another.</div>


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September 25, 2014TamaraTroy Jollimore

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September 25, 2014TamaraTroy Jollimore

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