REALITY ASYLUM
REALITY ASYLUM
REALITY ASYLUM
THERA WEBB
Reality Asylum / by Thera Webb
a H_NGM_N portable document format chapbook / March 2015
Copyright © 2015 / Thera Webb / All rights reserved. Cover & Layout / Heidi Reszies Lewis http://www.h_ngm_n.com/chaps/
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Evacuation Procedure / 1
Imaginary Appetites / 2
All my dreams keep repeating. / 3
One endured, one destroyed / 4
Ghostmaker’s Doll / 5
Cresting / 6
Raw Wheelers / 7
Inmix, to mingle / 8
Take One Bite, Consider It Swallowed / 9
Excrescence / 10
Othering / 11
Wood Spirit / 12
State of the Union / 13
State of the Union / 14
A Host of Beauty / 15
Methuselah Tree / 16
Orthicon / 17
We destroy ourselves like clouds / 18
Grab the night at the throat / 19
Self as the Hanged Man / 20
Bird’s Mirror / 21
Taproot / 22
To bind in a claw / 23
Anatomical Venus / 24
When the house breathes, it’s night. / 25
Alchemy of Happiness / 26
Night of wolf sickness / 27
Evacuation Procedure
stay in your room feel the door to your room
put a towel or blanket under your door do not use the elevator
if the door is not warm proceed along your exit path
if the door is warm stay in your room
stay in your room and use a towel to keep the smoke out and attract attention to yourself
remove people extinguish or contain on discovering a fire whoop-whoop in the hall
beep-beep on the speakers duck, cover, and hold you are here do not go back
Imaginary Appetites
a black wing flapping on the floor a bended arm in the ocean
leaves passing under our feet
I crave sweet in the middle of the night
a layered cake of asphalt and time I’m benzedrine alive in your veins
a child-king eclipsed I’m locked up tight
the hyphened arrogance of luck— a magical fish breathing hope through the gills your body holding the ceiling of the clouds above
All my dreams keep repeating.
Sometimes the dark world kills for pleasure inside your eyes the number 6 the tearing tongue lapping its own blood. Bow down, the king proclaimed today over. He doesn’t mean it. Come to the bedroom with your purse of blood. Feel the grass on your furred back as we tumble down the hill. Our power or absence can’t control the light. There’s a forgotten key to the multitudes inside you rusting inside you.
One endured, one destroyed
Orion’s dead. His body splashed against the hull of night, molecule on molecule of dark grasping the hills— the panorama unfurled, the wood both forest and fire now straining against the sky, a mirrored lake heat frothed and empty.
Together let us eat the soft meat of the breast, the dark meat of the heart.
Ghostmaker’s Doll
I, too, feed small birds
I watch the wind cracking feet on February mornings.
I’m sullen, souled, and discarded.
I’m an empty disgrace. But human. You fret, the hours of daylight weaken, you’ re alive still. Fresh skinned.
I’m a copy of a corpse in plaster.
I’m you in a thousand years. The evergreens grown taller, the bubbled glass on window’s eyes a lollipop. For houses here go silent as we pass.
Ultrasonic cool mist I’m pulling breath from your mouth a mitered corner between you and here.
Cresting
The air breathes with us when we unfurl our eyes to the delicate horror of ourselves the fingers of the trees scratching grey the birds digging in the sky’s gut
unfocus your eyes and the reflection of the world is a world itself when I was a settler, the world oystered in my view
the grass a shining pearl nacreous and open to the sky all night.
my hands have been butchers for 30 years the marbled ball of meat
it’s a navigational deviation a weathercock turned against headwind
the heart self-checks and repairs beyond us.
Raw Wheelers
Open mouth meet open hand crowned crowded on the wolfscape of your skin
I felt the need to bow to authority
Why envelope the past? Our history’s her’s cooled with wires a filament a diamante needle into water-falling like hair across your back
I blackened it. Regauzed the body beribboned.
Inmix, to mingle
quite sure, repeated, that the gods of living blow upon these empty shades. they point they were enervated, bleached great centralized, home-born gods the mob still keeping the woods, the hills the fountains in the heart
she gives them notice of their death where are they?
the fireside merry with gods of darkness tunbellied, rural gods of national resistance
an educatress, ubique dæmon the ideal of waywardness they brew in storms and tempests
if there is a devil in the flower, how much more in the gloomy forest, that morning star the devil soft and mild who causes law unchained against the law
Take One Bite, Consider It Swallowed
by quick impressions, I’m appling, a dimpled cheek in autumn mist. crisp flesh is gone and underneath, the witches’ bones. a dark tower halfway filled with hay, another, ravening in dusk. a third, a child’s heart, a tendon stretched like branches, if every day is apple season, I’ ve beaten back the clock.
Excrescence
Envision yourself horned got the rope at the end, single-sided tied jute on the flashed tooth a single strip, sided with light or halt the day. Time’s hand, you indicate light, you indicate an arrow pointing heaven, or a needle. Chain hinges, a hollow cone will see you wrecked before you’ re gone.
Othering
in this case I mask your presence with a cult of sorrows
a crew of starlings popping like a rainstorm bow to the rhythm of my heart’s retreat, advise the world against it, and still, a honey bee trapped in your fist buzzes.
all the lions have human faces, cut at the mouth, the muzzled cotton of.
Wood Spirit
if, in carving you, I am wrong, let my hands become sticky with syrup, let the pulse of bugs stir me in the stultifying night. my hand goes so easily through you— the banner of a leaf strays overhead
sometimes we fell trees with thunder, clasped the roughened barks in our maw and pulled till the light came through
it’s a saw blade, reality. churning through the gloom, it’s the next step in motion. water pouring topples cups and the planks come smooth. it’s more than easy.
mark the mountains stripped down to their sides wet stained with ash lately, when the rain comes I see your tree. it’s in the distance, darkening, lush.
State of the Union
Tonight we have an obligation to be susceptible to the sea. Education’s inconsistencies, the same anxiety as a return to the reaches of the earth time does not need us anymore. the mind, set to expire, finds a city of light. Hope, an ample resource, and the sufferings of war have been pronounced. Irregular election of the night survives experience. The American dream is, simply, zero in on the path and keep suffering.
State of the Union
Savage life to a single point made perfect in seven years. Hold the power and bear— a dwelling humiliated—our land a militia of grains and grasses indistinguishable from agriculture. Flocks and herds reform the yards and subtract the living fear from water.
Usurp and spoil. Industrial life’s at freedom’s door, we’ re 90 billion dollars short have sound and fashion been directed to prevent repetition. Have principal.
A Host of Beauty
I’m a human scab unmerging from a sentence you’ re a pond lily answering blue with gold your leaf a masterpiece of shadow my ashes falling ever down. cling to me, oh fireworks and smoke, when the air is thinner, I make you breathe in a closed room.
I’ ve become tamer. I tie my suit with a bullwhip, untie my eyes with your horizon the clouds a fish belly slack in the wind
Methuselah Tree
pinprick of alphabet on roots, bark mark the age of the age you are today. today you eye in the cloud swims you rhythm of the ocean pounding grate the land
today your pinky tears apart from hand tar bubbles sand your roots are too far from the sky to ease the burning of the sun down your body is an archive of staying here cyanide breathes. the tips of the grass move. into burning lungs. the touch of scorched water in the mouth of a needle
Admit, we darken everything we touch, and there’s no power left in a moth wing caught between candle and glass, or ivory torn at the root. It’s broken mirror, a dead bird crawling out of a flaming egg, a smoking scar up the side of the mountain. We’re barely animal. Trapped in an airplane globed in light, the wind a dancing dog around us, we breathe in measured air, our faces flashed across a city’s thousand screens. We’re cattled and controlled. In the files we’re blackened ink, a filament resisting light.
We destroy ourselves like clouds
What breeze whitens the sky?
On our backs, we melt into the grass like snow.
There are buildings taller than trees that blink on and off. We have finished the soil here.
Send it back to the river where the rocks are tumbled in glowing residue.
We have liquoriced the water. Turn the faucet off, or watch it flame.
My breath joins the air when I breathe out. I watch it turn to clouds rolling past.
Grab the night at the throat
This opposes light holding the hand between tube and screen the bones and outlined shadow a glove that scrapes the lining of space.
Dream diaspora dream your wings against a backlit sky and enter muzzle.
Dream of lucid dreaming and enter mouth. An unmarked claw comes closer ever change of shape brings spillage.
I wrapped my finger like a bone. Old flesh, and every change of pitch envelopes more. The walls are heavy with it. Slick light, the quiet body’s pain.
Self as the Hanged Man
in the hierarchy of meaning the sun is behind her behind the fog of waterfall the sheep’s head grazing glass
blood stratifies in rock. air stratifies.
if you were a shadow left on paper a wasp would nest it
a measure of millet, of working hands per mile the plants are always moving pixilation runs across the field towards her eye
what do you say on a day like today? your body breathes above the clouds masking the moon, your hung heels and the airplane waving
what good is a knife that won’ t close? all the time heals with a jump, force out the present through a steel loop. x out the eyes. gouge.
island lungs, air pressure I breathe out a tree
can be scraped of its entirety chipped cool marble off the statue’s face one time I spent the every day an ice chip on the ocean
tear away my eyes from your skin deflesh me
Bird’s Mirror
Golden bone and hammered watch me drift under the net of the sun. Here I hazard. Say the word and evening returns. Destroy the burn of fire. Quiet presence the night in dim jarred eyes. Fat iris, purple pupiled, darkening lid of rain in summer. It’s the pill of August. Sun turned hard in hand the petal palling in the tree. Break out at last—your reach to water still and falling into a gibbous moon.
Taproot
Entreed, A honey stomach filled with sweet Oh wasp, breathe out the cool burn
The world’s a swarm of chemicals
A jellyfish pulsing through the wave An ocean predator that crawls on land, Jawless fish or raven kinged in air Every eye’s the same eye:
Blood essence, Powdered stone and rot, The symbol of a symbol. Engraved on skin a tree caught mid-flame, a body merlining.
To bind in a claw
Sun stroke and too cold to rise this afternoon I watched the empty table grow without you. Your face in the cycling stars effects me like the stars themselves. What nostradamus am I, then, to translate you from this light?
I’m a harp played in the hands of the sun. A song from the bleeding neck of a goat. A small bird calling in a dead tree. Sometimes the sea ends before the sea. Sometimes the night goes on while you’ re awake.
Anatomical Venus
Turn the theater lights on a gleaming belly in vitrine. Her hair’s real hair, her organs hot from light.
The slashed wax, viscid aestheticized, and smooth, near breathing on a cool glass tray. The broken envelope of a mouth swoons.
Here women are like this, still limbed as a deer in the road, eyes, a sky echo. demountable, and pale.
When the house breathes, it’s night.
Think about the world moving under the floor. Worm herd, shackling roots to the dirt, all this is a spell I do in the back of a white truck. I can erase time for you. Dirt in your nails from the dig up, imagine the fur of trees, the scales on a slender finger curving. They don’t care that we’re here, corrupted mouth to mouth breath animated on the couch, I’m empty all the way down. How about you?
Alchemy of Happiness
As I light this flame from my mouth.
Expire the red stone swallow.
I’ ve cassette taped your voice for the 6pm still.
My tongue, transplanted to another’s body, I.
Pass through the river, a gold leafed sigil.
Thinned skin as ink, resultant.
Scars across the field’s back, I’ ve.
Spelled the cat with horns.
Remove the crown from the neverending snake.
I’ ll embrace the swan impaled on this pike, still flapping.
Breathe xanthic air between us.
It ballooned in a wasptail.
Stung the air. No sound.
I purify.
Night of wolf sickness
Hold me tight as I dance the past into the past.
I’ve multiplied so many times I forget the crystal sum— I’ ve cried till my face was dim, and rode the sand whales from room to room to reach this time.
Come cut this thread, affix yourself to my prickly coat— I suffer for it— I move in the shiny penny of your eye, the night bloodblack, and open like a white flower in my hand.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Inmix, to mingle is an erasure of a section of La Sorcière: The Witch of the Middle Ages, by Jules Michelet.
Both State of the Union poems are found poems from selections of State of the Union addresses by various presidents of the United States.
Versions of some of these poems have appeared in Hinchas de Poesia, Finery, No Infinite, and Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics.
Thank you to the other weirdo punks out there, and to Nate Pritts for giving Reality Asylum a chance.
THERA WEBB enjoys people not pronouncing the silent H in her name. Her work can be found in a number of places, including Forklift Ohio , Finery , Handsome , No Infinite, Hinchas de Poesia, and in Privacy Policy, The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics . Her first chapbook On The Shoulders of the Bear is available through Fractious Press. She is the managing editor at Black Ocean.