BY OLIVIA CRONK
To mouth such sickness such intense discomfort (but mere discomfort, not something grander), just very pervasive consuming intrusive, the stomach bad of thinking of
having sprayed perfume in the vicinity of a glass of water
the water on a lower surface
a lower cylinder of flat silk on which things could get caught
not “things,” rather: droplets of the perfume: chemical, bodily
worrying over had the water’s silk lip caught the spray, could the water no longer be drunk.
Then the sickness of knowing it’d be
simply poured out,
both possible directions of water-movement
absolutely upsetting
nauseating in fact
~
Even in knowing in the dream that all books already contain the world miniature,
I was more convinced by more thrilled by impressed with
the machine:
it was an xray machine that mapped the skeleton in some way comparable to how the
chalk line snaps down when one is employing a chalk reel in an as yet uncomposed space
a kind of flash-puff of definition
and somehow I thought this to replace books and other gossip
but language that is used to gawk must be made sculptural
and an erased distance instantly produces a kind of archive:
my ma and I sitting at a bank desk, having not slept, my father dead for a mere twenty hours, we told the eyeball-ish lady sitting across from us that we just needed to change the paperwork
in an awful but intoxicating tunnel of shimmer-noise, I can somehow see, in the far away, a kind of microscope/telescope image:
slow old scarlet lips
right next to, as if looking at,
a 1950s christmas elf doll on a brass shelf
in a nest of tinsel
lips looking at it
Olivia Cronk is the author of Womonster (Tarpaulin Sky, June 2020), Louise and Louise and Louise (The Lettered Streets Press, 2016), and Skin Horse (Action Books, 2012). With Philip Sorenson, she co-edits The Journal Petra.