O Coevals

~ for Rob, Myung and Stephen

Sovereign stumps make the shipwreck glitter

Being in the same place with you and calling
this coeval

Coeval enough to say hello not be
ing outside

What we would call event
to make a new sense I saw this city

Changed which lodged us how the past

Was once the past and the future
whenever we spoke

Anterior to any effect the present could hold

What couldn’t be
because we couldn't return from catastrophe


We witness bells that this was theirs
That shade equals sun in exquisiteness

Non-identities piling up like pylons
A physics without cars beings without

Impact move to what here to what
Their equated it I feel so much pressure

Around you to burn a discourse and not
Touch any time we were or event

Living us so live my life will never finish
What my death leaves unfinished this

Town never seems to work those sovereign
Stumps sing us into battle effects

Of power fires hymns even the sun
Forgot to burn so sing patiency which

Organs won’t be consumed what ex
Change won’t always be sung for being

Too far from off-shore what bodies we
Haven’t won’t account for limbs little

Substances Nature complicit with who
Gets to live grieves its contrivance.


like no one looped
their body in the d
ark this was mourn

ing to maintain an
identification with
that dark something

that was dug here
me and not me sou
nd and not sound

nor an understanding
stars account for a
place that won’t make

us live or die won’t
be consumed by the
violence of *our* voice.

2 after Courbet

with Dorothea Lasky

Dead Girl

In the face of value hers looks
In a mirror as if to not see
Herself instead a frame she keeps
Body paralyzed from the eyes
Down within the sound she
Makes not being active if not

For their labor a kind of prosth
esis darkened by the background
And their skin color complicity
Makes itself an object the living
Give themselves an alibi by play
ing dead or in seeming semblance

Says this origin the real thing
Sings without the frame to put it in
It must be fitted for us to be a
Spectacle it would resist reflecting
Pigment twists in vain to this
Like changelings can’t change

Proudhon’s mind bent to necessi
ties his smudges on spec and
Within the frame more than what
Spectralysis can show the thing
Before eyes were wrecked like
Little hairs dissemble night stars

Put flesh on flesh like pain appeals
To a cave the private was occulted
Brought to the light or origins due
Is what we produce when we work
Through the pane the pane of glass
That is our made worlds the folds

Of flesh of women uncontrollable
For all he seemed to dream them
Staggering before a way the sea is
Seen breasts spill out and foamy
Waves prove no realism preferable
To immanence denaturing touch.
~ Thom Donovan

We are from the moon

Courbet says we
Are lovers from the moon
I am glad that we are not anything
But the grand thing we were making that one day
That was bitten by sands, marvelous oceans
The tuber fruit rising among fishes
In a forgotten moon
Or we are lovers from the moon
Like the two girls all turned
But not lovers like the stag agape in the forest
We are two things in the whiteness
The black forest
I think we are soaring above anything else
I fight and walk, fight with everyone
I am full of fighting in my flesh
Courbet paints a woman so full of hair
Her flesh feels like nothing we have seen before
I rise and wake, I am a fish with broad lips
I rise and wander like a rising sea creature
In the rakish waves
I rise, I am purple fruit in the ocean among seaweeds
You pass and are drawn to something beneath
The ocean, and when you take me among you
I can see in you the things that I always was
~ Dorothea Lasky