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jessica obrien Nov 2021
dry and entering a shepard tone;

endless summer, sauntering, and my inner thighs are (yawn) raw from the sauntering.
endless spring, thawing icicles into
endless christmas morning.

this is not lavender, this is brighter;
i’ve underestimated everything.

suckerpunched into the bend of me,
deepening my lean to an acute degree,
like balled fist, like fortress, like fetus: potentialities.

wild chance is a hellmouth
salivating—
“a shepard tone creates the illusion of continuously swelling sound, which can build tension or suspense.”

this is an attempt to emulate a shepard tone through poetry
jessica obrien Nov 2021
/ˈvis(ə)rəl/

vis

—as if you could twist out your arm,
hand clawed,

wailing pagan poetry with the clinically insane
who have feigned recovery to get out &
proclaim it an escape, as if you could leap
away from already being gone.



(ə)

mattress on the living room floor.

rhinestone. ashtray. loose eyelash.

—as if you might lick the slickness of your
image in the bathroom mirror & instead,
taste the texture of flesh.



rəl

—as if you could feel the weight of gravity
spin, mouth open now: tin. blister. wool.

wrist-bone; book page. charcoal briquette.

clavicle; over burner coil. burnout velvet.

jawbone; wooden oar. dollar bill.

earlobe; baby’s breath. jingle bell.
jessica obrien Nov 2021
I.

all of physics boils down to approximating the body of an animal as a sphere.

in acupuncture, body is the ear.

thinking twice is a cricket of conscience;
the outcome ends, then the end begets.

a subatomic particle decays into an entangled pair of other particles.

pallbearers bring out the empty casket.

II.

the index finger bends to meet the thumb in
mudra, recirculating.

i had dreamt last week that an animal had died in my womb.

half resurrected elsewhere as a provisional version of another person,

half came back to me again as my own intuition.

trying to hear it growling in my silent stomach,
i had cupped my hand to my ear.


III.

all of time boils down to approximating
the realm of a moment into increments.

at the end of the first hour of the day,
23 more hours will rise to meet it.

who is to say another world is not imprinted
within our bodies like a hologram that we puppet?

all energy changes forms,
none destroyed and none created.

quantum physics parses out particulates,
intricately arranged to be related, to inherit.
jessica obrien Oct 2021
vvith help from a spit of liquor

gravitates ‘round the pyre, gulps
until highxr the flicker
inside her—oops!

must be supernxtural forces
twxsting these vowels into xxxx’s,
transversing her verses
into hexes—

slurrxng,
she hastens,
crossing her vvords

& mayhem unfolds from their nexus
vvhite vvitch vvasted

can you imagine the spells a drunk witch might cast? the chaos that that would cause!
jessica obrien Oct 2021
untangle the bramble of
(something that comes in multiples),
of (your first memory, in brief).

(a behavior) soothes the present tense;
its (animal call) no longer vicious.

coo its praise until (adverb),
from out of your mouth, (color)
(flower or plant name)s.

this, a blessing: (moon phase).
a madlib poem
jessica obrien Oct 2021
when water levels rise and shoreline fades,

so is the day, calling for horizon line.
so is the view out from inside
its own tide.

paint peels at the frame of the windowsill,
a moth pinned within its double pane.

as glassine sky recedes into the edge
of water,
lo, i rise awake at seamless hour;

i have felt the breeze at my fingertips.
i, above, dipping under.
inspired by emily dickinson’s last words:
“i must go in, the fog is rising”
jessica obrien Sep 2021
birds alight upon
sutures of a licked-thin night—
tree branch at sunrise.
haikuesday
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