Dance of the Unsquared Circles
To lure the taste of chocolate
out of chocolate, add salt.
It’s not the old equation,
only a recipe for sensibility.
Opposites don’t attract, just end up
like the couple that set fire to civility
and chalked a faultline down the center
of possession. Or it’s the other way around—
two people wearing their anger inside out
for twenty years—all that electricity
trapped behind a flickering of false lives.
Call it cold fusion, or misery, or lightning
minus light. Call it whatever you like.
The trick is to find out what charges what—
to know the differences that revolve
in imaginary spaces—
Andromeda and The Milky Way
caught in a waltz of mutual gravity.
Let cardinals bring out the snow in snow.
Let the tree behind bullet-proof glass,
its leaves spindling toward sun,
make you crave an infinity of ocean.
If you want me to love you
write a graffiti of rain-slick roads
across the Sahara of my distance,
tattoo a dusting of particles
onto the terra incognita of my fear.
—
This selection comes from Lori Lamothe’s chapbook Diary in Irregular Ink, available from ELJ Publications. Purchase your copy here!
Lori Lamothe’s poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, CALYX, cream city review, Emerge Literary Journal, Seattle Review, Stone Highway Review, Third Coast, and other magazines. She is the author a full-length collection, Trace Elements (Aldrich Press), and of two other chapbooks, Camera Obscura (Finishing Line Press) and Ouija in Suburbia (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2015).
Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.
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