Laynie Browne, from Poem Series

 Practice Has No Sequel

Inhabit the voluminous—book of each hand.  Leverage—places inside pause.  We offer to promote feigned selves. Come home, we say to a curtain. 

Is there any content in this maze—which is a face? What about untold confessions—after each death—unborn? 

Fear of rising is also losing a near beginning.

 *

How to separate future from past—when there is no future or past? 

How to include the unfolding—petalled hypocrisy

How to relinquish thought as it descends around the body like night

Sounds, windows, cicada-seas rise and fall 

One cannot ask any other because—no one is other

 *

Mourning moves stone lips 

Offers more than arms 

Where—inside which locket 

Grove coils uncharted

On the other side of a chasm, bereft

Again—misunderstanding impermanence 

*

Walk toward russet dilapidated 

Buildings see five dimensions

Eroded brick coverlet drawn 

Up against chin of wood

Culled gloss and sediment

*

The reader is spectral

Third eye collage

rivets braid

Turn—back be 

longs to a dusk storm

Alphabets break 

music and the sea

How to write about 

nothing—open 

like a stone

intimates gesture

_______

Photo slideshow by Laura Hinton, “The Shadows Know Covid’s Comin.’”(Photos taken on a Mediterranean beach, South of France, January 2020.)