Rae Armantrout

We are learning to control our thoughts, to set obtrusive thoughts aside. It takes an American to do really big things. Often I have no thoughts to push against. It's lonely in a song about outer space. When I don't have any thoughts, I want one! A close-up reveals that she has chosen a plastic soap dish in the shape of a giant sea turtle. Can a thought truly be mine if I am not currently thinking it? There are two sides to any argument; one arm in each sleeve. • Maybe I am always meditating, if by that you mean searching for a perfect stranger.

Shooting pleasures Ok’d by My being seen For Or as If. * Not just light at the end of the tunnel, but hearts, bows, rainbows— all the stickers teachers award if pleased. * Pigeons bathe in technicolor fluid “of a morning.” * If I was banging my head with a shoe, I was just exaggerating— like raising my voice or the ante. Curlicues on iron gratings: Can it be a flourish is a grimace, but a grimace isn’t a flourish? * On the inscribed surface of sleep. Almost constant bird soundings. “Aloha, Fruity Pebbles!” Music, useful for abstracting emphasis. Sweet nothing to do with me.

Dress like you care! Eat like you care! Care like you care! You don’t think apples just grow on trees, do you? • A fish taps a clam against a bony knob of coral to crack its shell — which demonstrates intelligence yes, but is the fish pleased with itself? • Alone in your crib, you form syllables. Are you happy when one is like another? Add yourself to yourself. Now you have someone.

If not being (something) is the same as being, then I will live forever. • Round shadow inside the sunflower’s corona. • If I lived forever would the present’s noose be looser? • Moon shadow made of angry bees, confined. Come in.

1 There’s a lot going on in “the” zombie apocalypse. But wouldn’t she recognize that her mother was a zombie? I mean zombies are a thing. 2 The last thing she did was point to one corner of the ceiling with a horrified stare. The nurse called this “a seizure.” As if words drained experience of content and continued to accumulate. As if words were sealed containers stored for safe keeping. 3 The background is everything that, for now, can be safely ignored

Ventriloquy is the mother tongue. Can you colonize rejection by phrasing your request, “Me want?” Song: “I’m not a baby. Wa, Wa, Wa. I’m not a baby. Wa, Wa, Wa. I’m crazy like you.” The “you” in the heart of molecule and ridicule. Marks resembling the holes in dead leaves define the thing (moth wing). That flutter of indifference, feigned? But if lapses are the dens strategy aims to conceal, then you don’t know what you’re asking.

I’m thinking about you and you’re humming while cutting a piece of wood. I’m positive you aren’t thinking about me which is fine as long as you aren’t thinking about yourself. I know and love the way you inhabit this house and the occasions we mutually create. But I don’t know the man you picture when you see yourself walking around the world inside your head and I’m jealous of the attention you pay that person whom I suspect of being devious.

1 The woman on the mantel, who doesn't much resemble me, is holding a chainsaw away from her body, with a shocked smile, while an undiscovered tumor squats on her kidney. 2 The present is a sentimental favorite, with its heady mix of grandiosity and abjection, truncated, framed. 3 It's as if I'm subletting a friend's apartment. Even in the dream, I'm trying to imagine which friend. And I'm trying to get all my robes together, robes I really own and robes I don't

A girl is running.Don’t tell me “She’s running for her bus.” All that aside!

1 Tense and tenuous grow from the same root as does tender in its several guises: the sour grass flower; the yellow moth. 2 I would not confuse the bogus with the spurious. The bogus is a sore thumb while the spurious pours forth as fish and circuses.