Charlotte Lieberman
How Spring
What if my stomach learns
to tear itself open without me
and I lose the blessing of what
it means to be clever and full
of wind, of sun, of spring. I am
afraid to admit that I want this
to become still as the wind
in a photograph of the storm
outside. Locate the sound of
my voice in your own teeth,
it’s there somewhere, if not
feel the fact of its vibration.
Your skin alone knows that
it wants nothing more than
to be home. There is no data
that can flow through
me and that will confirm any
of this. I want to tell every
one that it is information
fucking us all. The poem is
information to us all and at
the very least me. It is a spy
the poem is a spy.
Look at the sky and tell me
how it is that the bottoms of
my feet were once as soft as
my cheeks once were. The answer
I am looking for is not because
we’re living. I am looking not
to be taken home and I am not
looking for more information.
All of It
A commitment robust
as explanation, as
explaining something,
as this thing is all
ready explained and all
of a sudden its explaining
being committed already
itself it is
ready all of it now
coined. Or could it be
an issue of agreement
at this point or of
what point
to tell me how or what
we look like we are alternating
apertures (we are all
operating even when
our faith in equivalence
is just) completely without
bounds. What
is that the same as. That
I will spend money,
that my energy levels
have impact on.
The day, and that
I want to admit that,
all of it.
Charlotte Lieberman is a Brooklyn-based essayist and poet. Read her prose in BOMB, Cosmopolitan, Guernica, and The Harvard Business Review, and her poetry in The Boston Review, The Colorado Review, The Denver Quarterly, and Nat.Brut. She is an Aries.