Tuesday poem #289 : Jamie Townsend : SLIP

Open day with black lace as

per the morning ritual it seems

second nature that we begin with

shirt over the head

still so much to discard yet

at my barest I believe in

the subliminal why these lines begin

to overlap indistinct bits

and bobs below a stroke

of primary color passing over thin

pastel bleeds of cells wilting rose

after leaves and stand in for rose

illustrating holes in our skin

That’s where seduction ripens, bloom

blush and droplet, hard rubber

pistil, watery strings then sophoric dust

A floral rudder turning in the dark

dress fallen in a heap at the doorstep

concession to the pull of

the sun I guess impatient for

delicious shadow and sound

without locatable origin

I was hoping tomorrow would

never come and it didn’t yet

my nails chipped regardless I felt

a plastic blossom somewhat

delicate and mostly unnecessary

earnest wooden boy girl painted

and dragged towards the source

cotton, lipstick, Vaseline

The aesthetics of disappearance

Baby’s face mistaken for tattoo

Now it’s back to work to sleep

in a slip that hosts

this bouquet of silk forgeries

barest feeling where I curve into

its brace a velvet string

wedged between worlds

Jamie Townsend is a poet, publisher, and editor living in Oakland, California. They are half-responsible for Elderly, a publishing experiment and persistent hub of ebullience and disgust. They are the author of several chapbooks from Portable Press@YoYo Labs, Little Red Leaves Textile Editions, and Ixnay Press, among others, as well as a further chapbook forthcoming with above/ground press. Their first the full-length collection, Shade (Elis Press), was released in 2015. An essay on the history of the New Narrative magazine Soup was published in The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (Wolfman Books, 2017) They are currently editing a forthcoming volume of Steve Abbott's writings (Nightboat, 2019).

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan