from “Ordinary Entanglement”

Melissa Dickey | Ordinary Entanglement | Cleveland State University Poetry Center | October 2023 | 98 Pages

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what is safe not safe I’m learning unlearning
sorry not safe to put you in my body
I did not did not but in my mind

that’s fine no problem one part of mind
we call heart includes the brief
pained pleasure of pressure in the chest

remembering what I could barely receive
another who is who is who is
who cares what separates one

flag I don’t recognize from one
flying half-staff the message
blurred slipping slips either way

Wonderful is when you don’t know for sure
read the card above labeled jars
herbs the ex-girlfriend organized

ex means out of means past
rift exposed that hairball
once attached now on the cool curve

of floor beneath a dusty frame
reframe the trains
sound nearer than they are

paper cranes on the mantel hampered
by symbolic nature but why not
be more is it justice to want and want

under a ceiling of spread watermark faces
tiny faces that’ll never move again
except by disaster who’d want that

despite wanting to make us touch
sit nearer I’d imagined but it’s best
not to say everything I imagined

I extend an arm to myself
and myself and
reveal a delicate no touching

no room for you I want this man
to stop narrating me what will it take
I forget my own compositions

of blood water salt fables dusk
once I heard ocean as I fell
under the milky way arm

but not in any other’s arms benign self
come out come out
spent years as a house sheathed in metal

inside are all people I don’t know
steel stars bolt in a brick wall to anchor
still unraveling arrives

small red dot on my fingertip’s a bit
of glass pressed to think of you
hurts I keep doing it why

I’m ready for nothing to stop happening
so loop this rigging to a few flawed wishes
muster camps but want a guild

for this how to live din
how to live threaded
how to live tethered

no one tells me no one
stalls me on the ledge before I go
down where sight tapers to a nub

to find patches of bloom among the dump
to find events between ellipses
and wonder what we saw

that lichen move again
we saw that lichen move again
but could not see what moved it

From Ordinary Entanglement by Melissa Dickey. 
Copyright © 2023 Melissa Dickey. 
Reprinted with permission of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.