Not dust but

skin cells that

kept their shape;

 

tile walls of

mummified

pouches.

 

The average

use-span of

a plastic

 

sack was 20

mins. Was

it the strain?

 

The stretch and

filibuster

stretch of a

 

con basket

of goods? Bads?

Hold water,

 

hold thorned

dropped, bowling

bowl fruit.

 

Latin name:

Ananas

comosus

 

or was it

cosmosis?

Add both to

 

the bag-ette

Add sharp squares

Add kilograms

 

Add cosmos

and see if

it will last.

This is no flash flower,

this unfolding page of text

a starfish all at sea in hard print.

 

Botanists call this stranger

a carrion. Its odour is unpleasant,

designed for blowflies,

 

not us, a tie of demand that hurts.

Glabrous, all it can do is embellish,

in an almost ordered way.

 

I am reminded of stacked boxes

in a factory, kilometres, all neat,

uniform, profit-making,

 

the stacker immiserated,

immersed in a flight of thought

against the clock.

 

There is another way.

 

In the patch this stapelia

extends a firm, scrawny arm

clutching a closed envelope

like a secret.

 

Only one flap of the corolla is open.

Try measure the day by how many words it takes

to float the chrysalis

1.

 

Nothing is great

as such

 

only by

comparison.

 

 

 

Nothing is similar

to anything

 

only by convention.

 

2.

 

If they look more like ants than flies.

If they saw you from across the square, making notes.

If the air then grew warm with want, with anticipation.

If that’s how it started.

 

You said you name things according to intention.

You said ‘an organising principle emerges’.

You said ‘they move as a single body’.

 

If a white ant is a biter-off, a comma, a finger traced across the page.

If one follows you home and asks to come in.

If your hesitation gives the wrong impression.

If there’s no place to spit in a rich man’s house but his face.

 

You said you saw his cupness and his tableness.

You said they’re in the woodwork now.

You said: ‘no thoughts give them away’.

 

If they split into separate factions and issued a set of demands.

If they found the doors nailed shut.

If meaning depends on the truth conditions of the proposition.

If dignity depends on patience.

 

You said only teeth and fists clench.

You said only heads and tongues loll.

You said ‘every month has its ides’.

 

If you worked to get a view over the wall.

If the smoke hung like a swarm.

If you could see no further than you might throw a rock.

If there’s only one method for managing a crowd.

 

You said conscription is a writing with.

You said the text knows things the author doesn’t.

You said ‘no gesture without import’.

 

If you consider it first under the profile of redness, then as a liquid.

If the river you step into is not the one in which you stand.

If regret presumes things could’ve been different.

If everything is water.

 

You said thought is iterative and anguish is necessarily wet.

You said you couldn’t find the words, that the borders were porous.

You said: ‘the whole alters the parts’.

 

If progress is measured in mouthfuls.

If a hypothetical is predicated on a possibility.

If they ate away the foundations and unmade the category from within.

If at least they no longer belong to the emperor.

sing a reverse burial

the mangrove cryptid

swallows bike frames

 

its exoskeletal graft

under muddied skins

some old body’s jingle

 

rings to nervousness

as sludge flesh tickles

a kayak’s hull agape

 

eyes the scout hall

in a theory of leaving

piers tremble and tip

 

reading out crab tracks

the membrane of marsh

accretes a wet language

 

stirs up dried limbs

water arcs through

metals and sediment

 

of a root saline sweat

stilted and panting the

golem strides inward

 

egests the stark past

a cellular sovereignty

mapped in tide pulse

like a ghost or a short, quick river

Martin Harrison

 

 

Replace one water with another:

 

the spectre of drought in Vegas:

imagine dry showers, being sanded of dirt, like

in the dystopian movies we’ve seen:

filth an extra skin to be

abraded, the porcelain of beauty mags

now only available to those

hermetically sealed in, away

from any megapolis:

 

the stop-start of the border river—that once

swept illegals away with its force, now

dammed into walllessness

—a stand-in for the future of water

restrictions “back home”: the dry creek bed

of childhood the longest

deprivation:

 

on talkback, news of a town committed

to underbid the restrictions enough

to donate the excess to their botanical gardens—

at last a true collaboration: the future

of beauty:

 

flow evaporates to standing water: to

ruffles the surface’s satin sheen,

reconjures the old crinkled shot silk of it: abundance

of light, still unfurled across its surface:

the surface, memory, shrinks