Even Happiness Makes Me Sad
by Naomi Shihab Nye
You aren’t here to feel it with us or
remember anything we already lived through.
I rode a cable car thinking how the Little You
loved the conductor’s foot on the pedal,
his right hand ringing the bell by a rope.
That same day I rode a Waymo
imagining the Big You
marveling, studying the screen.
Rain pouring all night in December.
Drenched leaves.
Snips of colored paper.
Ribbon too small to tie.
Living action does not by consistency consist
by George Quasha
Living action does not by consistency consist
Parties all the way down destroyer of configured ontologies
Who could handle our biodiverse internal mirroring external narration….
Of being too numerous to bear….
Image is a state of waiting for confirmation by voice in your sleep or travel by night.
The edge of the world is here shored in the middle.
These are not real questions but mixed sensations learning to read.
Poiesis is language all middle and sailing.
Already I’m feeling unmanifest surfacing at the gap.
Angel in the details
by George Quasha
Take me out to sea in what I see.
There’s no turning away but meets itself turning on a bridge.
When it’s got you by the eyes the angel scries until she cries.
Magic and threat have the same entry valence as a child knows.
Anywhichwhere says it all at a crossroads.
The temptation is to end in glory.
Meanings come and go on the horizontal plane in no time.
With mixed emotions the where of getting magic has no rules but what you make.
I keep trying to remember to cultivate the habit of breaking habits.
Thinking out to sea is shored up mixed thoughts alight in the crossing.
The details are lettered.
Middle language is spoken in middle earth or so the story knows.
When the time comes
by George Quasha
We like to say equal opportunity yet nothing is the same all things being equal.
The ambiguity saves us from instantaneous fundamentalism.
A single wild dancer gives signature to unmeaning literals.
The kairos from syllable to syllable as strand to strand is only true voiced so.
Seeing orange undefines color in person.
The sea is here before you and speaking for that matter.
Truth in image advocates no advocacy.
A line seeks the richer form of whole holding in to itself freely.
I am myself at the beginning of the line that finds me other in the end. Now.
Zero at the start wondering if I ever return is it me?
Psyche showing up is thicker.
Selves know each other by entanglement.
The self pattern evolves in loop de loop starting no point.
The moving zero reflects out of time.
You hardly know it’s there in sourcing the tangled bank so why think to say it?
Delphine leaping between elements displays loopy self integration no doubt.
Figuration has crawl.
Right timing is never only in time.
It arrives the more.