kari edwards
Now, forever and beyond time
What would happen if we heard each other, heard the truth in each word, standing in unity, in a state of equanimity? What would we fear standing alone with incorrect prepositional phrases, if we did not fear each other’s perfect imperfections, while we climbed, bound by bone, fastened to flesh? Would we need nationalistic borders, entry committee quotas, bleeding silver fish infested dictionaries? Would we need to pretend we are the most enlightened locomotion, all the while scheming economic survival, if we held each other’s love while climbing? If we are doing the doing, can the flame that can, consume us, adrift in motion, if we only talk while we fall? And can the faithful fable driven by passion to be a fable, be more than a fable? Can the overwrought abstraction, help us dust off death while we all burn?
***
A concept going on and on about itself
In the factor, ground level, do we know, unable to remember, happening again and again? Maybe one is suppose to suppose to be here, maybe not, linked, tied, and restored for another interrogation, another temple of virtue questionnaire. It does not matter matter, where the work is, watch your step on both sides, blue is no longer blue, but paradise financed by that that devours itself in a reign of fear, it is so much more, not ending with the physical, in the name of global unity, but now all can wear identifiable traditions, and hold a cell phone to each ear.
***
Stirred to prayer
Tell me how connected bodies blinded by remote thresholds, swim in glacial river zones? How a heart like a heart, like lips, like an ocean, how drudgery of reentry combines Las Vegas and the Nevada Test Site? How do we, can we be so conscious of delight and corrective ideology at the same time, acting out clear cutting interventionist practices in public delirium, where the value word, enough, is never enough to see through alter egos tall enough to blind, while mercantile dreams continue to dance laughing vignettes on our sleeping remains? Tell me how to speak to holiday campers who colonize a colonized land without being caught at the base of my throat? How do we continue to live this imperfect capacity of sympathy at war with the collective body, desperate for an equation glimmering in nationalist bric-a-brac singing simple text books long one way exit signs?
***
kari edwards is author of obedience, Factory School (2005); iduna, O Books (2003), a day in the life of p. , subpress collective (2002), a diary of lies - Belladonna #27 by Belladonna Books (2002), and post/(pink) Scarlet Press (2000). edwards' work can also be found in Scribner's The Best American Poetry (2004), Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action, Coffee House Press, (2004), Biting the Error: writers explore narrative, Coach House, Toronto, (2004),and Bisexuality and Transgenderism: InterSEXions of the Others, Hawoth Press, Inc. (2004).
Photo by Brian Casem, 2002. Special thanks to Frances Blau for her help.
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