from Daughter Release

I

Gilded limbs heft the porcelain heavenward.
Claws settle on tile for ample footing.
She floats unguarded and something neutral
like milk clouds her emersion.
                     Her leakage sours
and slides away, her whelp cries empty, and
a capstan hoists toothless from her womb. Submerged.
Drowning pool.
                     Brahms drifts adagio
from the parlor and a cylinder winds
crimson outward, making three things one.

Fetching pails of water goes Jack. Goes Jill.
Goes the whelp’s empty cry fathoms below.
Swimming after.
                     The claw-foot grips tighter.
She mixes tears with sea foam, a confluence
against her breasts. Scarlet purl. Hoisting, hoisting.




II

From the bathroom, supersaturated,
she opens herself to the parlor.
the little matters leveled to importance
in a late-late-digital world.
                     Someone else’s
breakdown becomes, entrenches classic form.
Chase the echo calling, calling. Chase the echo.

Puddled on the floor. Flesh to wood. She lights
votives, scented of lilac, and intones
a measured séance. Quick dreams of her
beloved: song of guilt: silent love. Hoisting,
hoisting.
           How does one cry away, with perfumed air
choking, young ones never remembered?

With an echo they remember. Calling, calling.




III

Molten teardrops varnish the coffee table.
Syringa vulgaris traces back
a Harvard moment.
           Six walls formed
a cagey absence.
           She was told that
the answer was in the engineering.
She was told that, at times, these conditions
were desirable. She was told to enter
the room and listen to how her body spoke.

Trembling before the threshold
crossed her: “A sound accomplishes nothing;
without it life would not last out the instant.”
And she knew there would be no calling, calling.

The anechoic chamber remained without
until her body sang. One high. One low.




IV

One high: electric, reasoning, efferent.
One low: arterial, distributive, contained.








It was the thought that thought her possible,
and anything at such a pitch would prove
intelligible and knowing. So she guessed.


There was nothing to say, so the body
went on talking, humming high-pitched tones.








To deliver life at such a slumbered-pace,
red entwined with blue and blue entwined with red,
was how she unknowingly drank oxygen.


There was nothing to say, so the body
went on talking, humming low-pitched tones.








“Until I die there will be sounds. And
they will continue following my death.”












Joshua Ware lives in Lincoln, NE where he teaches writing and is pursuing his PhD. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, most recently 580 Split, Anti-, Bat City, New American Writing, New Orleans Review, and Word For/Word. He is also the co-author of the forthcoming chapbook I, NE: Iterations of the Junco (Small Fires Press, 2009).






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