Mama Explains the Exteriority of Invention (The Talk)
1.
in the hands of another body,
din, the mechanics of desire,
the filament pulsing in it and lo,
in a way I understood how to articulate.
2.
genealogy like eyes, they have the same, or gait,
because of our gray flecked dark
us or do we bear their resemblance?
3.
in a paragraph, I check
to see if the flue is open,
your draft, my desire
the fingers of thinking.
4.
of my thighs (I’m always lending),
like birds, a murder of pages, the murmur
codex and we are endlessly
scrolling.
Boilerplate
to any word you get a kind of love:
Earthling, starling, darling—
as if love was the evidence of attention,
with my mouth when I think
Like sycamore. To tell the truth
in you, if only to register
skin, words striking against
Just to hear their ringing.
Afterlife
from the way I tasted, my body
for miles, like the Mariana trench.
with your appointments,
of saffron in the glass tube
there was a child. God bless
easier than her face
is on, I hear her soft breathing,
the light from the window growing
the Gulf wind, the fronds of our
and this life I was after
Lindsay Illich is the author of Heteroglossia (Anchor and Plume, 2016) and Rile & Heave (Texas Review Press, 2017), which won the Texas Review Press Breakout Prize in Poetry.
