by Rosebud Ben-Oni (Art by Bill Wolak)
No one wants to talk about linear transformations
if one lands you in the ICU & it’s a matter of converting
power into motion & your only chance is
to covet, when the fever is speed. Think
of an eigenvector of shear
mapping: how being that sick
distorts the direction of everything
but you, steady course & clear head.
Not that anyone believes you
rose so high like two balloons,
straight upwards & close to
bursting. Like your own lungs
drained into emergency room
fodder: the little fool babbling
she’d become a final test,
algebraic, the very study
of what it means to reunite broken
parts. When the fever’s this, no one
can solve it & even the doctors
drew from the wrong logic: Soma,
soma. & all we can do is. Sending you
over the edge, collective prayer to
the pseudo. Across your eyes, their shadows
rose high, disembodied & kind. The body, creaked
the machines, unconnected. You heaved,
intersecting this world of imperfect
symmetry,
& loomed &
dipped, wavering
the northernmost
star. It was both of you who bent metallic
glass & graphene grid. From soul, mind
& psyche. It wasn’t them. Or that they gathered
& wept & gave in: if her fever had reached
just one degree higher. To this day it remains
an open secret, how if it wasn’t for
pneumonia,
you’d never know love
so conically, through vector
& matrix & leukocyte
collecting like eraser flecks
& all the times you rubbed
& abused tender
paper, until so thin,
a pencil would punch
right through, voiding
what can be said
about the nature
of a solution
as accident.
Was it worth it, the years
the fever must’ve taken.
Did it make it that much
harder, to exceed new
limits as they whimper: soma,
somnolent, soaring. Since, here,
arrows do end
like stop signs
obscured by tree rings
of graffiti. & all you can
do is
covet
that old fever who never breaks
or yields, its power to dislocate
what has made you delicate, so that you are,
briefly, fundamental. Like pure & complete
expression. & nothing, you tell yourself,
will ever separate you again, when it hits
from both directions,
as if throwing you
from a busy street
& right back into it.
Rosebud Ben-Oni is the winner of the 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery, forthcoming in 2021. She is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and CantoMundo. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, POETS.org, The Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Journal,Hunger Mountain, The Adroit Journal, The Southeast Review, North American Review, Salamander, Poetry Northwest, among others. Her poem "Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark" was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, and published by The Kenyon Review Online. Her second collection of poems, turn around, BRXGHT XYXS, was selected as Agape Editions Editor’s Choice, and will be published in 2019. She writes for The Kenyon Reviewblog, and currently teaches at The Speakeasy Project and Poets House. Find her at 7TrainLove.org
(Artist) Bill Wolak has just published his fifteenth book of poetry entitled The Nakedness Defense with Ekstasis Editions. His collages have appeared recently in Naked in New Hope 2017, The 2017 Seattle Erotic Art Festival, Poetic Illusion, The Riverside Gallery, Hackensack, NJ, the 2018 Dirty Show in Detroit, and 2018 The Rochester Erotic Arts Festival.
Artist's Statement, "The Smile of the Body That Surrenders", collage
I make collages out of all kinds of materials. Most are made out of paper engravings. Many collages are digitally generated or enhanced. To begin a piece, I select some sources—either color or black and white. If I’m using magazines or prints or old books, I cut out some images or parts of images that interest me. Then I start working on a background or some other sort of chance construction. Much is left to fleeting insights. These are tiny miracles of inspiration. Depending on whether I’m using scissors and glue or digital images, each collage could take several hours.