The Fort Jackson Dam Can Take No More / DICTIONASARUS / Roman Prelude #1, inspired by Natasha Trethewey

The Fort Jackson Dam Can Take No More

           

What’s left is

the local newsreels;

the WLTX women staring pixelated

at us from the website archives;

immaculate Swiss-design studio

as the videos of homes sinking into

water;

palmetto trees with their fronds thrown

up dancing the Charleston

loop in reels. Then, the week off school:

a river where a road had been;

a dropoff mudslide where a road had been;

a lake fit perfectly into the

cul-de-sac of Cotton Hope Place.

Cotton Hope: halfway through the half-

vacation week, I biked

through the road-rivers   homes with innards

torn out,     my neighbor stood

there too, among the   settees and bedposts

and throw pillows of her house,

I stood there with her   as we took boxes of

photographs out from the   mounds

of her life,   flicked     photos apart like

sticky notes,   let the graduation travel

photos curl around the edges as the mud ground

reached to hug our feet.

---

DICTIONASARUS

after Franny Choi

  

	HEART	GUN	YOU	MONEY
Meaning	life-beat; life-clock; skewed tesselating triangles; donʻt stop	tiny time machine; to the future	consciousness of constellations; ursa minors and libri on the street	currency of fingers and toes
See also	DMV paperwork; plastic pens; plastic electrodes; Walgreens	Capitol; core; me; any synonym of NRA; disguising; disgusted	SMS text messages; sophomore year; street; sign	pebbles; stars; cycle of tide waves; cotton; breeze
Antonym	earthcore metal; filaments of spirit	bougainvillea	my synapses	granite
Origin	what are we to say; of what cannot be said;	the first rapid-fire; by Gatling; but the real rapid origin is in the marrow	see: HEART	ephemerality; in dreams; agree; wish on dandelions
Dreams of being	dust	undone	actualized; realized; monetized; commercialized	you

---

Roman Prelude #1

 

When we were under a sheepskin blanket,

watching the football championship—the

nattys—flick by on TV, imagining

if we took the Martinelli, poured libations

out from the bottlehead, you told me that

reality is people believing

same illusions. Elude delude prelude

to this PDF file of trifles,

JPEG for sending sonograms across the

interweb to all the love-lost people

out there, are the soundwaves ripples of my

stola oversized t-shirt—really

the illusion for you? Mutual bene

pro bono, as the Clemson quarterback

rounds the plastic sterile airpainted field,

I think that I’d like to unwave my

stola, inspect your alabaster crags

of a face like a museum sculpture, see

if your lips are cells or dust & illusion.