4. Greeting, Acknowledgment
Insincere supporter of all-embracing, inclusive standards for female beauty,
She works her way through the Bikram poses
With lithe geometry.
All the emotions tormenting her
Gather around a pose—
The disorder of her feelings
No longer disordered,
But bowing down around the pose
As she makes a camel
Of supple limbs: belly bulging,
Her lumbar spine,
Like a compound bow
Tightly drawn,
Hyperextends to create
A shift of her body’s natural arc
From concave to convex.
Her trunk filled
With a pent-up desire
To regain its quiescent position,
She circumvents
Overextending her back
And discharges
The energy locked in her core,
As a wave imitating the pattern of water
The bow of a ship
Cuts through a stream, or a shock wave
Detached from the railgun
Projectile, the polished till gleaming,
Denuded and stripped of its petaled sabot, flechette
Setting on fire the air,
To diffract through the curve
Designated her core,
And project at the end of a stem,
Like a full and mysterious length of umbilical cord,
Blossoming outward her essence,
Deployed
Steering wheel airbag
Shaped like a mushroom cap, an ethereal
Distillation
By spirit or focus
Propelled (by way of a blast
Of nitrogen gas)
Through the world
(To find out who she is)
(Can’t find out who you are
Sitting in Beverly Hills)
Can confront
All that her soul
In compliance
With top secret,
Eyes-only clearance
Security protocols
Duly imposed
By unconscious desire
And repressed self-knowledge,
Set up,
Obstructing the path
Of her spiritual journey: the scene
Well-lit
By a bank of electrically ballasted,
Filament free with a discharge of vaporized mercury iodide lamps,
Moment of impact recorded by
Dozens of
Hi-speed cameras
Recording at
More than one thousand
Frames per second
For ultra slow-motion playback
Sublimely devoid of the most inconspicuous flickers of light,
And under occasional blazes of
Arc wander
Firmament plotting a spun sugar star constellation
As spider web
Windshield crack, moonlight
Through canopy broadleaf reflecting a face
Hard as marble
And smooth but unreal: gentrified close quarters
Hand-to-hand combat veteran,
The new ‘it girl’ from darkness emerges.
Her facial features a marking paint silhouette on nylon,
The gas escapes;
Vented
Perimeter tabs
Flutter;
Black and gold calibration mark
On parietal bone
Traces a variable radius arc
Through the air
Upon impact, just prior to
The next pose.
5. Basement to Attic and Everything in Between
Tension stored
In the recurved ends of the archery bow
Disperses.
The cord of animal gut
Loosened,
The bow unstrung
So the layered, laminate
Nocked bow-ends
Draw close together and
Making a ‘C’
Nearly touch in a rabbit pose
Like a pair of calipers made from brass
Gently pressed to a sudden outbreak of skin disease,
When the doctor checks a congested pustule
That’s come to a head, or dividers measure the smallest gap
That is all but contact, the empty space
A young Roman architect
Thinks about.
Tension scattered, diffuse,
Yet ready to draw itself up full height
Like thin liquid through
Porous fabric of
A loose, ultra-absorbent weave,
As a female deity,
Floating above, so unearthly,
Ethereal, gathers a skirt-hem of bullseye rosettes,
Multifoliate ripples of energy, petticoats spread in unwrinkled array
On the ground, which are secretly, unbeknownst
Nearly to everyone, governed according to new metaphysics,
And
Tightly winds
It, our latent tapestry,
Till emerge
The distorted nubs
Bound with thick rubber bands.
These misshapen thickenings, once the bands
Are removed, unravel
To show capillarity: corkscrewing
Spiral organic shapes, with concentric rings
Like some wild, asymmetrical,
Raggedy
Splash-button crater
Discharging its rays through the crust of the earth,
Marking intrusions where ductile, deformable, mobile material
Vertically pushes and forces it way along fractures
And structural flaws in the dense brittle rock overlying the mantle,
A cluster of isolines mapped topographically
Bent like the pitch
When a pattern of bunched-together
Guitar strings gets yanked on the fretboard to show
Elevation or altitude
Rapidly changing on slopes, banks, and hillsides of valleys.
Sections 01-03
Read Sec. 01 at Deep Overstock (click here for link).
Sections 02-03 can be read at Expat Press.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Mark Parsons‘ poems have been recently published or are forthcoming in Ex Pat Press, Dreich, Cape Rock, and I-70 Review. His books include Stills (Southernmost Books, 2023), Lake Tahoe is an Elegy, (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), Spiral (Anxiety Press, 2025), and The Kingdom of Middle Children (Southernmost Books, 2025). He lives in Tucson, Arizona. You can follow him on X @parsons_mfa or https://x.com/parsons_mfa
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