Hello! Here is our (very late) favourite from our ‘Chaos’ challenge! Congratulations to Mathilde Sergent for her brilliant poem – keep your eye out for more prompts coming soon!
AND NOW for the next item on our list:
a gavel-sounding brand new nineteen-twenties motorcar, off whose gleaming countertop
light slides like moonshine—lambent, the reflection of teeth in a store window: value
for thought, to dip in the sharp-edged end of your auctioneer-friendly shopping cart. THINGS ARE CHANGING. Things are changing: waves are rising crested with adamantium, heaving tsunami roars, they are proving
that a wave is a wave is a wave is a parcel of rain and whole ocean alike. That a wave
is the sea in motion and does not lie down
unless asked with a flutter of the hand, flattered, soothed, petted, to part and peal open
for any counterfeit Moses.In fact the quashing crush of silver-lined waverush is left unnamed, just as the female bliss. It is a mystery borne from fear.
Blue-feathered Como, on the other… will name you ’till there is no meaning left to be named after, ’till you are subsumed in its labeling fury; staking
with sticky notes and striking nails the tail of a Latin sort of dignity: heterochromia iridium, you are an unequal bloom, doña of the Lario. (A wave repeats itself; a wave’s fold is not surrender.)
Isola Bella, despite her name not a fair once princess, but present in the very earth, will under the guise of civility
pin to the chiseled stone its whole array of butterflies, robust hydrangeas, nerium oleander shrinking, envying our European laurels their pale and poisonous beauty: what competition do they serve for the orgastic feast?With his fist
he broke a large mirror; anger cracked like a whip, unsubstantiated—in
one man— the defeat of all things that shatter, brittle crystals, mole mounds, church turrets and ziggurats; no coats of rare shrinking flowers, rather
bones— more things which like beauty do not bear to be reassembled, sellotape-stuck, soothingly churned back to health, only put away
for lack of comparison when more things are made in their image. Isabella I’ll take for a swing; dancing through the rubble
compares to the whip-lash of hard seascapes against the mountaintops, cracking with a lover’s slap —bam!—, scratching the coast’s red beard, eating dust until its song is hoarse:
things, calls the wave, we sell…
THINGS ARE CHANGING
BUT WE CURRENTLY SELL
The climb is paramount so priciest, although we imagine you will enjoy being dizzied, washed
flushed lilac by the stone-breathing air;
wilderness being always the sea in hiding.
