Issue 28 – Summer 2017 – Charlotte Lieberman

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.

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