An Important Rule to Remember
I stay alert for a chance to steal
with an eye on the distance,
another eye on a well-designed carrying case
Holding things that look larger
Inside a smaller space
Grain — and the god of grain —
My cheerio soul —
A dwarf planet after the goddess — And in turn — a chemical element
In the seal of New Jersey.
Can a harvest
Make us homeless?
A succulent, all flesh and juice, taught me
All gazelles are antelopes, while
All antelopes are not gazelles.
I can’t tell what boundaries
I should keep — limit
Means you’ve been unrestrained —
Does it?
Rooting the Asymmetrical Plane
Enter, find the universe of movement
Inside the stillness of your seat.
There is neither horizontal nor vertical
Rectangle nor square
My symmetry is a Gameboy
display darkening meanwhile
Ellen makes the case for breathing
and infinite variations.
Before I learned
not to hope
I was hoping we wouldn’t so
Love the steel trap. You can't
change the planet
or your skin I mean
you can’t not. Find
your edges and gather them.
Look to the tardigrade
the pioneer species
Float your scull back
to the center in a slow yes
Settle into your new shape, each part
a button or a shopping cart caster or a swivel stem.
Ellen's voice chops into silence
Faces hover in unison
Cars wash by more or less and the birds
and the buds
A Birth
We begin without water
Out of sync, then in.
An undivided potential breathes
It isn’t mine
We’ve seen the other
Mother on TV
The centimeters and other
Math, and violence
It isn’t always that way
For example, there are
Better ways to fall
There are in-between
Seasons and eclipses
Of the full moon.
Machine and body tend
To your airways
I can’t see you, and oh
There is a light that never goes out
Then you’re pressed to me.
We begin.
Beth Ayer is a writer and editor living in Easthampton, MA. Her work includes a chapbook, Limping to the Big Bad (above/ground press). Her poems have appeared in Apartment Poetry, Divine Magnet, jubilat, and Sixth Finch.