from toward eadward forward [with interruptions from the Sowgirl of Salzburg]



THE WALK & THE AMBLE

clocked at midlope, every mare facilely unropes
any strict predictions of flight, unleashing
locomotion like a prestorm hushponcho
the full gipper of precipitation still on the lamb

arching a clipped hoof skyward, clops down
impounding in puddle a cloud bank, a cone of error
or leaps a brick niche in furclad furor driving
its own warm hide by slack over rocketing strides

the slow open gammed gait of an aggregate body
unabated gives birth to a warren of rabbits, a boon
whose exiting bushels of sallying tushes
usher a second degree prickliness in the orifice
each shuttlecock forthing undocked as if by schooner
a knotted shock of downy assets leaving the bloomers

the suckle-sated nestmates bivouaking nightly shore
up a shelter girded by their own interlocking appendages
an ecstatic but nodding combobulation
a thick mess of drowsy possibility
they are sedge-browsers as well as perambulators
ample in coniferous intake, sampling by mud-flanked rudding

and here the pathway to the scissoring extremities
begins at the shammy lapped hindquarters
begins taking stock of what one notices
searoar wordspoor umlautdrum
an amble as twice sprung maelstrom
whose sound is absconded but movement
lashing, four flyway wind currents concurrently

thrashing a field of addled cattle, their surefooted
and peculiar brattlings riding the hammerdressed dare
the earth you miss while the foot bobs in air

First tong-handled, then bruskly tendon-strung. Involuntarily sty-whisked, the Sowgirl is forceably removed from her preceding situation. Her skirts, as they are soil soiled, are intercepted and prohibited. Entering in frocked strings, the clinicians ceaselessly test her skills. Finding her lacking they resolve to found her again - on agreed upon principles - bickering in flecks, an ad hoc flocking of behavioral experts. The Sowgirl, they record, is able to extract the information NO and WARNING from negative commands and possibly the information QUESTION from yes/no interrogative intonation. If someone uses a word she recognizes she responds to it in a uniform fashion regardless of its grammatical or semantic content - reacts with the associational delight of a previously visited and pleasantly regarded sonic situation – but one largely without contextual variation. This, at least, is the clinicians' diagnostic interpretation of the Sowgirl's initial eagerness toward their investigations. When her demeanor changes, radically, to one of uniform morbidity and disenchantment, their diagnosis fails to change with it. It suffers a rigidity that is itself never put into question or the subject of equivalent self-inquiry. These days, the Sowgirl no longer luxuriates in unexpected snow. She has been told no, so, when the skypurge and subsequent urge comes she merely putters, broad-haunched and faltering, mutters indoors, in doorwells, peering out, subject to an implacable remoteness.

One breezy overcast morning the Sowgirl throws her glasses high up on the hospital roof. The therapist/linguist asks her later, "Where are your glasses?" The Sowgirl takes him outside, looks at the roof and laughs, heartily. Other persons bend punctuation to their will as the Sowgirl bends laughter to hers. Tittering most immoderately, the shoulders moving rapidly abreast, cresting upward as if sculling, she has found a giddy overwintering site in arm heaves, in the brisk teething of all plasticware placed before her. At night, alone in her railing-bordered and buzzer-equipped clinical bedding, she returns to echoes of her mother's earliest moonhour and moodily delivered incantations: "ought to be whiskered, our muses, not whispered ... ought to be estranged and tree'd." As she gazes restlessly about the room, an uproarious incandescent aurora arises through the locked window - radiates off the undecorated institutional yellow walls - yawking - soothlubing - unparalleled in its sensuousness - until the day when Madeleine enters and likewise sets about unfettering spaces. Madeleine who immediately lies at her feet in supplication, and for no articulable reason purrs, begins singing, keeps melodically and repeatedly stuttering that "yes, a dog behind a fence was behind a fence, all right, um hum, hence tense, oh yes, but a cat behind a fence was not behind a fence at all, no no, my my, not at all, sigh goodbye" - returning with each hypnotic variation to look up at the Sowgirl in uncowed eye-blanching ardor.

THE TROT & THE RACK

the supple extension of calf and femur shafts
are sapwoods of mobility, demure typhoons
whose gullyside cogitations sully the pull
toward pure rapidity via skittish dervishes

a grazing to taste, a fawnskin cushioned blaze
of distracted antics, proceeding by taproot and halfshoot
as if cotyledons were synonymous with tingling
hamstrings and a coy polyp one whose haunts
might feasibly deter the gauntlet of standardization calls

swallowing instead an upturned pebbles gut
laughter composed of its newly exposed spoils
that this could buoy
simply by proving the undergrowth there
in curious posture, listing, but short of destitute
its roundabout crouch and exacerbated wares

to which you bent so low, sucking your cheek fat
tight plunging the face right into the cool sauce
of water cabling a northward eye in resolute pursuit
of contained heaving, of soft bloated amphibious
flesh baubles, of a toggling velvet expiration

and no frogs were disturbed in the looking
of that delicious underbelly
for once you didn't fumble for purchase, driven
instead by an inner rumble for near viewing
as if vision could saunter, pupate
populate by similar orders of glutted smallness












Emily Abendroth is a writer and artist currently residing in Philadelphia, where she co-curates the Moles Not Molar experimental reading series and teaches literature and creative writing at Temple University. She recently received an award from the Institute for Anarchist Studies to continue her efforts on the extended essay project, You Are Your Own Worst Enemy: The Use of "Self-Abuse" as a Mask to Institutional Culpability at Eastern State Penitentiary and Guantanamo Bay. Current work of hers can be found or is forthcoming in PocketMyths #4: The Odyssey Project , Encyclopedia Vol. 2, and Cut & Paste #2.






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