Anne Moore Odell

AN INTRODUCTION TO WHAT COMES LATER

Are the hands screens or projectors?
          The hands are magic breath and HVAC systems
                    The hands are busy pickers and fast talkers
They are nailed down bullshit but still hallelujah  

My hands feed my nasturtiums from above
          My hands feed my lamps from below
                    My door seen from the other side by the hands
My lungs seen from inside, just the fingers spread wide

The eyes always boasting ringside seats 
          Gross eyebrows waxed over 
                    The relief of being a tourist
To my heart, my invisible heart

The cunning freezing hands
          sing like a slow swell, the unshored 
                    the hands’ tides, the hidden veins, the inside
What sustains? A summary of taxes.

What remains after elephants are gone?
          There will be nothing triumphant
                    Nothing absolutely perfectly sad
All ceremonies will be pointless

Yet there will still be a choice of problems, 
          a privileged choice of “okay”
                    Trying to land the ending
Trying to land on the same page

FLUENCY

Reading. desire. all the time. body. all the time. all the time.
reading. the reader. watching the eyes. the quick jumps.
and the fixations. priming the eyeballs. with partial lines of sight.
people joke. about tinfoil hats. but trackers are styling.
smaller than. small. a sand cube. an eye seed. the lesser case.
the water falls. the sounds of cicadas. in fact saccades. in fact desire.

Letters to the left. more letters. to the right. the falls. why we are terrified.
in praise of upset. stomachs. always trapped. by the new and improved.
your right. no. stage right. adaptation. spacesuits. death masks. sickle cells.
family flocks. fighting off intruders. lookalike intruders. making nicey-nicey.
adaptation. camouflage. flagellation. positioning. side-by-side piles.adaptation.
digital clocks. sea lochs. sea levels. glacier cracks. the world. pre-and-post. cell plans.

the family groups. of cardinals. the dna of most. dinosaurs. the penny collections. 
of nine year olds. the path of the cat. from the closet. the potential of beauty. 
creams. tribes drawn. in the sand. the female’s. brown-red breast. unreadable.

ANNE MOORE ODELL lives, teaches and walks around Southern Vermont. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Miscellany, Broken Plate and Grey Sparrow Press.