Issue 003 – Against syllables

Valerie Coulton

against syllables

bell shiver

night cough

mothered in a wall

your mist

is still a cover

you appear

as insect, tiny drone

the work of forgetting

never done

blue 1971

blue 1971: everything was mixed media on wood/he broke off pieces of chocolate & gave them to us as we walked/sharpened pencils in a knapsack pocket/small painted whitish clouds heading south & slantwise/now a membrane separates us but we were on the same side for many pages/they only seem erased, vaporous/tired of trees, of marshmallows, of going up & down the stairs/it was a year with trains in it, maps, airplanes & cars/a grey blue highway & dreams we neglected to describe

invited to walk under the river

with its white lacings
I don’t want to see a cross
but a mathematical direction to
put these patient trees together and count them

grief of trees
horses of Achilles

my father waits on the other side of the river
in a way that dates him: a devotee
of waiting

day bread in the trees, they’ve gotten too tall
for us to see their leaves
our eyes were not made for this
our necks

day by day, a stain, some stitches

surprised to see the same stars here that I
had seen so far away from here

a cloth to wrap the sun
waxed paper
my father unwraps a tomato sandwich

the dead are notoriously hard to please
I write
but that doesn’t make him smile
watching the river
chewing carefully

Valerie Coulton is the author of still life with elegy, small bed & field guide (above/ground press), open book, The Cellar Dreamer, and passing world pictures (Apogee Press). She holds an MFA from San Francisco State University. She curates palabrosa, an online chapbook and interview series, and she lives in Barcelona with the poet Edward Smallfield.