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j/j hastain

From

 _cultivating cadences to invert the given creed_

We are maturing by becoming harmonious kismet. A place with no clocks. A site where we go

by heat amid ageless gripping. You slip your body into mine, saline-guarantee. My hair

mixes with the soil on the orchard floor. The soil still drenched from last night’s storm.

The mid-point of the diary begins to shed words that were inked onto it. We see a flash of the

image of a cut open lemon. As the diary husks itself, we praise the words which we receive from

it as musk. We place our hands in the ink lochs and then touch each other’s bodies. 

Senses are committing to new collaborations.

So much poised on a washed up mid-point on the shore of this cosmogony.

Here, what was once obscured becomes a blaring homage. Intrauterine and its many reversals.

We embody devised estrus. We concern ourselves with alternates.

In the pre, I wondered if gourds, fallen fruit or tongues ever grow without a middle. I

wondered what was required in order for rounds to eventually be instruments that we could fill

with chords.

How does this relate to our bodies?                              

How does this relate to our pages?

That morning the fallen fruit we ate was the texture of dried wings. Such intake is how we

learned to prefer, what would proffer. We could not leave the orchard until we had finished

reading the diary and reading sometimes meant bent consumptions.

Visceral pools replacing what were once limpid ways. This always to continue building and

fulfilling the wish.

Even though disturbing, the artfulness of a dream, or the way that it makes us feel bared,

compels the cells to keep it.

In it we are being sent to a prison where they put needles into our knees to keep us limited. They

do this to keep us from being able to bow to each other as our deities. As revolt we trans locate

into the ether. We follow your body into flight. Predators eat the bodies of birds, but they often

leave the wings. We collect them. We stitch the wings of the lost ones into a new set of wings

that will take us. Whereby we will soar.

This makes us royalty based in tactile sibilance.

Does the fact that we feel so much like mystical content, mean that we are going to cross again

soon?

We flay frailties until they too become fulls. We do this for the sake of tutelary. To recognize

ourselves as impending. As an ephemeral ecology’s imagination. As we nuzzle we

remember the lake where in human bodies we once ate a picnic on a blanket in the wind.

There is a voice that matures but does not get old. It resounds through the orchard like the pineal

gland’s relations to coil. Sometimes the voice makes us laugh. Sometimes it makes us feel

reverent. Sometimes it makes us weep.

We knew we were applying an indelible pressure that had broken the spine of the diary. We did

this in order to get further in.

I love hand-made anti-balustrade.

Oh lace-clot.             New Lancelot.

The dried roses sang songs to us.

We propped them upright in fresh soil where the diary’s scattered pages also laid. I wanted you

to plant living things between my legs. Between my legs, where once only self-planted jute or

metallic parts protruded. Parts that were planted there, because I could not not be the garden,

even though I was not Eve or Adam.

If I were to be a gradient or genre of garden it would have to be one that changed so

reoccurringly that it defied seasons. That it could not be ended by anything exterior to it, because

the moment it was realized as_______ by something exterior to it, it had already become

something else.

On that brink or this one, compressed and drenched feathers are often mistaken for human blood.

We left the pots empty in order for them to catch the red rain. When we woke we found the

skeletal structures of wings in them. Aesthetic lucidities. Chunks of human plasma. It was as if

the sound of beating wings was coming from an unseen heart or genital in the center of our

union. We offered what we reach with.  You laid down your wings, and I my hands. We

carved imperfect replicas of each other’s figures into the soil on the orchard floor.

This so we could ensure our fragments would remain useful parts of the rue.

Teaching cognition new ways to hone.

This desire to fractalize fractals. The hope of revealing previously unforeseen doors. Because

perhaps behind them we would find. I wanted more of you even though I already had you. You

want more of me even though you already have. Probing.

In the orchard, in an infinite suffusing state you teach me to eat your feathers. You tell me how

ingesting your body moves our ephemeral effects through. We do this to replace the memory of

things fallen. To make enlivening conjunctions with the fowl that lay dead on the

path. This reminded us of our previous forms, even though we could not see them as clarities that

we could relate to. Even though we could only recognize them by hint or hue.

We are still trying to welcome each other home.

And what do our genders have to do with home?

And what do our sexes have to do with our genders?

Poppet in need of being translated. Like smells returning from where they had gone for so long

to be sounds. Dissonances, rounds. We shared each other’s songs in order to become our next.

Things coming into rotund because they are carved so tenderly out of diverse roughage.

We are our own rubble. We are primal excess, diversifying.

In a spiral of images, colors, sensations and tones we store the petals that have fallen from of the

already dried roses. We store the peels from the fallen fruit. We store the drenched feathers.

These are not dead because we have placed them differently. Like the female he’s body is a

difference I can place all of my parts in.

We felt a buoyancy of new nerves erupting.

The luminous, transparent bridge arriving and departing as we grip.

Wherein earlier a ring was placed on. The connotation tattooed. That this was also a purpose

of the orchard. A plump black blossom with incisions: “even though this will never end, find me

within each fluctuating bend.”

The wide sky is in front now as we entwine and begin to move toward. The ashen and exhausted

trees are behind us.

Do all bodies have to leave by way of them turning into a visceral explosion? By way of them

entering an all-consuming light? Or can the lovers merge with such attention that they end up

able to remain in their orchard, that refined crevasse that they have filled with their sounds?

No perfect shape, but shapes trying to perfect by combination, by small perforations.

An enflamed sense.

A glass orb reminiscent of an apple.

A radial gauge.

Pastiches and assortments are meant to be rubbed. We are trying to make the next stories

applicable by making nests out of them. By resting our parts there in order to make a synthesis

even if that synthesis is slanted.

Chimes made of bread are an edible thickness. The hamam bursting with demanding viscera

provokes us toward a different type of confidence. A volitionist chivalry.

We are picking up the residual pages of the diary that are becoming embedded in the orchard

floor and hanging them as tidal tutelage. They dangle, prayer flags hanging from the stoop.

Positional metrics. Morsels within a world of meters, waiting to be washed. Waiting to be

burned.

No more flawless a place or pitch                       than the orchard is.

No more flawless a palace, than this place made of and making our non-original essences.

Ever adding verdigris to the memoir, in order to change how the histories have chafed. It is how

things slip that makes them give us calluses. This is why we worked so hard to stay. This is why

we refused to stray.

Marks on the human knees from those summer nights on the trampoline.  Embodying memories.

Embroideries. The power to reconceive.

We admit that sometimes taking on these complexities is like pouring glue into trumpets

then trying to blow. The cock of a female he is both sentiment and how we will come

to our future sentiences.

As we do this, poplars are falling. Bruises are coming through the skin by transfer. Our relation

to muteness is being force-effected so we can intone the reddening grace.

All for the sake of renovations without removals.

For unbridled omission-less lush.

It is risk to implant in something we do not yet know how to protect. The orchard. Our desire.

Our gleaming genders. Our inarguable authenticities.

Because we are uneven, asymptotic figures; we wanted an entirely anarchic environment. A way

to transmit another kind of safety.

But we had to do this through the body where there are lit bursts that are flaying the bursa.

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j/j hastain is the author of several cross-genre books including long past the presence of common (Say it with Stones Press), trans-genre book libertine monk (Scrambler Press) and anti-memoir a vigorous (Black Coffee Press/ Eight Ball Press (forthcoming)). j/j has poetry, prose, reviews, articles, mini-essays and mixed genre work published in many places on line and in print.