09. Oct 2007

AUTUMN 07: Kristen Orser

Kristen Orser is an MFA candidate at Columbia College Chicago, where she is an editor for the Columbia Poetry Review. Her work has most recently appeared in Redactions, Columbia Poetry Review, After Hours, and The Trident.

Remember to Eat During this Sadness

To hold this position involves the curious disposition of blindness or of putting your hands over your eyes, pretending you've disappeared. You have to carry o
like this for hours: Enticed to eat mushrooms after seeing footage of bombs. Hours later we'll send care packages.

false morsels - obsessions - water hitting rock - sales and poisons - time - tiny
candles - arsenic fumes - your pretty mouth - pyrite.

Each child is required to consider our absence a presence in the shape of dolls, taste of candy, and temptation of open hands or newly snapped daffodils.

We must live in two worlds. More.

All of this happens at the same time as this: You are telling a joke and touching my thighs.
Palestine is bleeding. Under the bridge downtown, Jacob was stabbed. I am in love with Cary Grant.

Rachel is kissing the Dead Sea. Such red

(red.red.red) as her lips lets us describe loving and dying. How we describe defiance.

Poor Rachel.

In the afternoon, in order to compare our visions or delicates, we'll cross the bridge between here and there. We'll call the bridge the first fragment.

Thoughts from an Egg

()

Inside the still pure form
they're women, generally, or chandeliers

something with skirts on fire.

There's no rush. There's a lot of gold
rust in my head for some reason
I only see hot. Not usually cooling or

()

after. A horizon-
yellow line painted on
a white wall we are forever walking into.

You really have to look:
I've been painted in bitters,
called this my Dark Ages,
but for some paragraphs about unicorns
suggesting remedies.

()

Sister is sore from remedy.
She's been trying to fill these brackets
with something other than her heavy breathing.
To her, falling from cliffs is an obvious danger-

the women in our family die early
use the phrase, at long last.

()

It's part of our design.

()

If I send you multiples which version will you choose?

Will you wonder about compliments and pears
or worry about repeating cuts and bruises.

()

This is not a single person miscalled in first person

but a many persons afraid of falling rocks at any time
or being choked by fire.

The women are eggs and the eggs are on fire. Below the ground

quartz and rock relate to burning
and we call the end corrupt.