Poem by Anne Gorrick

An amnesia prayer

(after “Folio #1” as suggested by Google)

A rarely executed move in chess, a rarely seen animal

The side of a Rauschenberg shift

Assemble language

Florescent flutter, flash idiom, fractional pollen

Flippant, flirt, eyelash slang, A flat minor, a flood of paper, campfires

Cameralism, without a name, without limits or rage or pain

Or training wheels or supervision

Witchhazel profiles temptations, provocations

Papillon, Narcolepsy Magazine, readymade breakup, an old lady cadence

An event of geographical ethics in spaces of affect

Event opal, postcolonial shame, grammatology

International intervals, nouns never sleep and are not compounded

Pre-owned wedding dresses, preoccipital notch, styles of preoccupied attachment

Thoughts of the self and food in 1985

Approval matrix, are art and joke synonyms?

Scary maze game, Vinyl King, search the sheets for static

Strobist, words containing the letters z,q,x,j,v

Words caught by the sun, in nets of golden wires

Scheduled rumors dance in stadiums

Less line numbering, scars and chords

Serpents in my hands, worse than Serbian film

Traffic light, mixed drinks and mixed greens

Mix and burn swimwear, mix a little Goose in this juice

Your serious plans, your prudence, your moisturizer and champagne and tigers

A little cake, dragons and lithium, comets over Corn Island

Seemingly unrelated aggression, lyric sleep defines the carpet

Endless, unsolvable meaning, acts of culture

Alligator facts and allergic reactions, trees are a logic problem

Manswers, death etiquette, party favors, party dresses at the Parthenon

Competencies, periphery, decorations disappear in the solidworks

Inflammatory diary, in Latin American emphasis, in latex

Enlarged nuchal translucency

Non-shedding dogs converting large numbers to scientific notation

Numerology and nudie jeans

Prank call this phone number

I love you, I miss you, I speak a little French, I Google you

I made a game with zombies in it and then manifested my soulmate

Manipulation under anesthesia, histrionic and hidden fields

She novelized her static and sent a postcard to Henry Purcell

A secret virus, a demure maiden, a worn path in the clouds

An amnesia prayer, a snowman’s bones

Etaqua in Bubbleland, shaky shaky, improvident

Handwriting, hatching leopard gecko eggs, red jumpsuit apparatus

Socket, cough, white wine

Comparison charts, her breathing was coherent

Use the word “coherent” in a sentence

When “chaotic” means “dictionary”

We’re controlling metamaterials here

Non-coherent fault trees

Even her footwear was famous

Heretics and heartbreak in the hereafter

He is less educated than her, less attentive

Is lizard lick towing real?

Is less accessible that field, than property

Sleep smoking, the sodium in sea salt, less studied languages and diseases

She studied the behavior of infinite sequences

Nonobservance of his Agrippa

For a heist in France, studied facial expressions, the forensics of fried chicken

Fluid mechanics, fluctuating asymmetry, joke, fever, workweek

A Venetian bestiary and its plaster of sincere interest

Trace, touch, crouch, pause, engage

When the critic cries, “Dollhouse!”

Cross-eyed palmistry, patterns, palm trees

The paper eyelashes on her astrodentist

Astronauts are particles as smooth as hoarfrost, teacups

As temperature increases pressure, the solubility of gases and solids,

volume and resistance

She wanders alone through photography

His eyes are like sparrows, like Japan, or fidelity

The earth’s summary, all red in explanation

Waves of ammonia among her cloudy trophies, her mattresses

She is a two-premise deductive argument, an illusionist

Her house is an illustration, her ferns fear god

Wrong conclusions autotune her head through a windshield

Dog years, cat years, gerbils years, geology

In general, what is meant by the texture of a rock or the cause of a sea breeze?

In gestures, their origins and distribution, their dynamic language dimension

What is the gesture and participation in the activity of searching for a word?

Skin overnight in antonym

Nothing of value was lost, but you know the end of this story

New moon blossoms and ruins, priceless, pernicious

She is patient, she is parachute, she is papering the windowpanes

She is part of the music continuum

Part of the hemoglobin that binds oxygen

Hibiscus and hipbone, part of his parole conditions

His bones are made of coral, glory poured out like a pasture

Is percocet on the periodic table?

Themeforest, corrupt water, atelier

A transient madness toward advanced mathematics

A transfer in heat between particles of a substance

_____________________________

Poems by Anne Gorrick will appear in Altered Scale 2.

She describes herself this way: "My work inhabits a space embodying both place and machine, and is informed by living near New York's Hudson River my whole life.  I also am captivated by all kinds of mechanical gardens - trains and their tracks, cars, tools, senseless metals.  I am currently working on a series of poems that are experiments with translation engines, creating sense into nonsense back into sense again.   I am hostage to the accident, the fragment, the unexpected.  The experience of putting language through a mechanical process makes words more into things and then somehow more malleable, more surprising."