how we live with whom and what we love

bundled light in the sum/her/time/dustgazed feral luminescence/a thinging/lurid with decay/unfolding amongst the brackets/a certain breed of happiness/a supreme honey/your weather goes through me/the obfuscations persist

there are infinite types of darkness and infinite types of light

the gazework/of the necrotic moon/a phoneme ripped apart/like a hunted certain idea/envoided for the cellular better/you machine a voice to suit your needs/a delinquent fluttering/defaming the shade/waste solids into sweetened grandeur/insatiable stardom/parenthetical decency/some people always step in the same river twice

the casual misuse of another

such lovely folds/the flowering monolith of I/the lustre of bloodguts spoken in perfect bloom/an abattoir/s rude costume/where did all the red in you go/you must grow a body to be tendered with/the sway of promise/a fragile hand collapsed inside your own

gold and harm

the sway of promise/these clumsyhipped structures of flesh/nearly depleted elegance/work for the song in the rot/memory garment’s dark artery/a shimmering vowel of deluge/the dark mess of self/fatted insolence/relocated to leisure/a new gravity will come/freed unto the sky

where does our warmth go

a tender browse/sultry & heavy with raging flowers/time is shut up/the eye of the passenger patrolling the body/the body is never an accident/lush & unarranged/the drifting skin of the future/frustrating the experience 

to the gloss power 

the plotted body/vulgar reversals/anatomical supplicants/voluptuary fault of the eye/sad corridors/slick effigies/flapping light/raging flowers/sour eros’s spouse/sprawling for pleasure/knowledge can be bondage/a life of parts/subtly ugly/the sentence is unkind

Carleen Tibbetts is the author of DATACLYSM.jpg (White Stag) and dossier for the postverbal (Carrion Bloom) as well as several chapbooks. Her work has appeared in Sink, jubilat, DREGINALD, The Offending Adam, Deluge, Action Spectacle, The Notre Dame Review, and many other publications.