five poems

by Carleen Tibbetts

disassemblage of the I

feral the oblivion in you/darkwish your ersatz heart/recall each little howling/have faith in an empty room/a word ligatured/embedded wth tonality/have reverence for the voice/work the green/in the unshatterable quiet/even the trees become unreasonable

an accident of water

the fake red of anger/cheap like tinsel/these decommissioned thoughts/this is important/mainly because of the people in the conversation/paradise by any other name corrupted/to hear only blue/the demi-real/the impossible crawl/to find an elegance in the pattern

all for the mountain

to crack open a clock/and understand nothing of time/holding onto the blue hour/that wet audacity/the falsification of glimmer/to hunt down in desperation/to pray for rain/confetti your elegy machine/the surprise reframing of an utterance/all life is borrowed form

the shape of things to come

enraptured/enruptured/an oblique savagery of union/impressively dark/such an errant body/an accident of water/swayed into shadow/candle the unrequited language/cinder the blushed sky/the fantastic splashing/a translation of skin/wild things don’t feel sorry for themselves

the unbelievable dust a name leaves behind

the trope of flawed privilege/an accident of glass/out of language/disrobing/small structures of light rocketing toward you/infecting your face/say spangle into the mirror of forever/any dream in the shape of this/effigy of hands/an eventual harrowing/sunning your ideologies sidelingwise

BIO: Carleen Tibbetts is the author of dossier for the postverbal (Carrion Bloom Books, 2023) and DATACLYSM.jpg (White Stag, 2019). Her work can be found in many print and online journals including jubilat, Sink, Notre Dame Review, mercury firs, the tiny, The Laurel Review, The Pinch, Deluge, Dreginald, and many others.