"You Are Just a Bunch of Stories Held Together by Hope and Fear": Poems by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas
"See through the gauze of / our forms."
Astronaut Tree
Birds speak ancient languages. The Tao gives instructions. Here we float among dark matter, obvious being the enemy, and we take by-ways, resist the starry path. The Sun sheds its fire feathers, the whole universe surrenders, a cycle of burning joy, reversing nothing. The loop of my grief, my dumb longing for impossible things, (said Pessoa, painful in its absurdity). Jupiter rises, a distant strawberry satellite, and like a nomad slipping on flagstones, or a goldfish dying, I am here on their pale, oblivious faces, saying what I have to say by not saying it. What is the pattern of anger? Have I put on its brazen, lead vest once too many times? What is a poplar in outer space among the purple murmurs of asteroids, all on the precipice of revolt, the golden searchlights across event horizons.
In My Candid Undoing
The delirium of small reason (so says Nicolescu) is a busted-out lock, a punched black hole to an interior world (from where my bicycle was stolen). We cannot guard our atoms, hair inevitably falls to the floor, it’s a DNA sweep, a timed dissection, and the wood-block tyranny of small reason— the war within you and I— grows like sea monkeys in a glass. I’m new here I said as I unbuttoned my blouse. This is my virtual influence, in the produce section. Great tragedies are born this way.
Clairvoyance
“Our world is a collection of processes, not entities.” —Alan Watts
Do the unbound thing. Tie a ripcord to a candle. Cut off your fingers and try to make bread. Watch a beetle blink, assassinate your mouth. See through the gauze of our forms. Oh, I remember this part, we both see words disintegrate, then you and I create graphic underwater sex reefs, come up for air, in time to dissect all our dualities. What can you see in me, this distant clock of eyes stacked?
I Was My Comeback
“I, who have been so many in vain, want to be one, to be myself.” —Borges
Ah stork, voiceless bird—truly a Lithuanian. And when we surfaced—I, myself, and she, we came into this, wrapped in a paper mâché dossier, copper mesh covering lips, and I saw: my eyes had split, retinas unfurling a lace waterfall, then a crow’s radiated caw, limestone dust thick, and the forest sprung across my face: trees spoke to me. I grasped my first fists of soil then—and there is nothing and everything to hold onto in a fistful of dirt, millions of organisms, concentrated life in a single clump, yet it slips through fingers when water flows through—and how my throat, now affixed to an apricot heart, an amethyst secret, flowed, a burning playbill singing again, and how accentuated my return became, when I was a finger-paint disaster. This triple self of me, and here, a cough in the back of the theatre, yet how alive this mystic became. You couldn’t find me in a lineup, you couldn’t see me until I screeched alive, alive, synapses then death to us. Repeated it. I burned each day my own memories, destroyed to create, super-protozoic-soothsayer. I didn’t want to be right, always pulled my punches at the last second. When I finally felt my body again—music in a prairie.
