Jamondria Harris

Love Story i, ii, and iii

Love Story i

the caterpillar shit falls in rain and with air, all day

& all night there is no time where they are not laying

the history of their beauty in eggs or shit or sleeping

in a tomb made of their flesh to burst and ride

color out of the living deluge of what they were

born to feed upon, and be trod under. what patterns

laid on your back pull shadow and bark over

you/towards great heat known dreaming/what did you draw in

through & on your back/towards light unseen 

(the people who left the pots on mount Lico were

quiet and in their long silent wandering rose with

the mountain from the plain/they laid in the red soil

& made vessels of themselves for what they had found/

their travels having made a tangle of death & dream to bring

forth children/inextricable from the play of water and shadow

in any eye/ & only ever witnessed by those who bore them) 

(the city seen at dusk between the red earth and canopy is

wrung through with monumental, mortarless stone laid

as a serpent has bones to carry itself in and out

of sight. the pale ridges fall to powder along any edge

set and reborn/this pigment is holy to the people on the mountain

it is the only pigment not red as soil or blood and so it is gathered

each evening in the precensce and aftermath of the sun and it

is at this time you may be able to speak to and see the people

hands and mouths filled out from shadow by dust until

they are wound back into their homes that wander the walls )

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Love Story ii

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when people are speaking i never find

it necessary to watch them , the more

we speak & the closer we become i can barely see you

as that face speaking mainly you are scent-based

and i am thinking about your mouth and

also the secret hair down your belly often

too marks along your shoulder or the

taste of all these things which map your

words  through my eyes the closer you become to

me the less I can recognize you in passing

if i have not slept next to you in a while

every day i am not near you there is a little

less of you built  and our language

gets further and further from

translation and i am in a place where these

ends do not meet and i will begin again when

there are no more words.    

 i'll keep things for you,

our children or as a child, like you to me but

as indefinite as you could claim.

I can hold us in until i have no room for food. The key to us

entirely is my shitty memory. everyone I name I

remember in phases, as flesh split

layer upon layer into glass & a taxonomy

lesson. I will never stop knowing you, or how

to slide you into one body:

translucent, enumerated

such that you & I and all know what you are. i talk about my hair when i             want

you to have the intimacy of knowledge

of my hair with your mouth or your hands.

i am as embedded in my hair as any

dirt. i have grown into my hair as much as

brass cuffs and what i could not wash from

who has been near. if i want you, i want you to

touch my hair in shaping desire, noting

perfection of disparate parts.my hair is not curious and is not a curiosity
         there is nothing to be satiated in the touch, i would have you seek

and wake seeking enfolded in what comes from me.

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Love Story iii

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in this /elsewhere 10,000 years/

i take the most time thinking a body,

and do not name,

lives like fire ants in the flood: bound and bitten & brought under   as                   many  as possible

until some soil ruts, forces beyond you dam the obscure origins of water & to you &

yours the life of the deluge,

run ancient over before and below, barely alive by any means,

evidence of  the incessant escape & infinite ear

right root of

power over & under drives every

mouth and foot in desire of undoing,

in and of  demon lack, with no face,

again unbowed and again unborn

with nothing to recognize, without

the lie of memory & same is as same does

in kind there the right root of power over & under drives

every mouth and foot in the desire of undoing, in and of

excess, a million-mirrored ornament, a manifold and infinite

open throat down to come again,through canal, again constrained

into strength enough to be born, again bound into constraints to give birth, again consecrated & same is as same does in kind there the right root of                power over

& under drives every mouth and foot in the desire of undoing  

    the gift becomes the god in song that bears/ the created being/ that did             not consent , no more

than a divot in flesh is your true home where you are held, where you are           rendered no animal , in the grace of gratuitous drinking and eating in          gratitude,

by which you are

no animal, to pass in your pleasure and lie unburied,

unable to reach heaven in the guts of a vulture the high sum of all your steps in no account 


the dark is a hand & a half

pressed over the edge of the evening, tucking

us in & together to our skin.i am ready to lie down. I am hungry.when you          cannot betray

this to rise  same is as

same does in kind

these are perseid attunements/stone from the sky as homes burn & no one can get cut-free from the salt stench of our entanglement/nothing is separate/ is it ever possible/to be touched more than once by your own grace no more than the gift  can void  this body/ elsewhere 10,000 years/