Olivia Clare

Two rooms, the Aegean, 2008 , there lived a rhapsode and his wife. When they ate, they ate straight from the vine. Her curves, sibilance, Serbo-Croatian chants. His chants, curves of clocks, burnished bells. When they ate, they boiled wings and gills. Nights, slate olives, he couldn’t see.

Little Enoch learned his colors from lettered blocks (for a is the color of fleet, b is the color of war and demolition, c is the color of echo and blur, & c.) and built a bricolage: So cab was a whirring warbler. bach was the Spanish Armada crashing and crashing. And enoch he couldn’t describe. And when it reached the height of Enoch, standing, he tore whole tongues down to their colors.

Women asleep. Carlight, east red and west white. Women, and men made of them, and lambs in their droves, and power lines east to the women-made men and women of men, when a man is a sum of what women he knows, and I blurred my vision till I saw a woman and lambs in the streets, west red and white east, and I wanted to eat. Women and men, don’t fear me, I am a hand come to wake her. Red in the west says woman is man is woman is man.