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      March 22, 2014The Letter Before AColette Inez

      The letter before A carries an absence
      waiting to be born
      out of radio waves and ghosts of lost rhymes
      unnamable as god in the void.
      Carrying a presence dense with text,
      the letter after Z waits to be born
      into nothingness—phantom dispatch of anonymous
      names blown at the illiterate fair
      attended by every invisible child doing nothing
      and the little brown fox jumping and scrambling.
      Aleph’s ox horns, an A upside down,
      and zed on a sled to oblivion.
      Read me twigs blown in the dirt, veins
      of porphyry, cranes in a line.
      That alphabet of cracks on our lips, and in dust
      lightly written, signaling hunger.
      Lean flesh of words unspoken wait to unfold.
      Meaning dances as we spin words, mysterious, reciprocal,
      linked in marked conglomerations,
      the alphabet of ashes in the absence before A
      evolving to clouds
      and the letter after Z buzzing with hypothesis.

      from #20 - Winter 2003

      Colette Inez

      “A poem is born right here, somewhere in my heart, in my blood vessels, in my gut. It comes to the brain much later. I have to feel them actually pulsing in my body, and then when they get shaped, when the brain, the controller, the pilot, whoever one’s metaphor, however this metaphor can extend, takes over. I like to think that my brain is the lesser part of my poems and that my heart, in the best of my poems, is the one that rules.”

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