Imagine you are the wildflower.
The pocketwatch.
The ground coral
and lapis, the dung.
A brassiere of shrews
opens. She gathers verbena
and straw.
He breaks gin,
breathes kind,
lingers,
fingers.
She hangs with the
plaintiffs, misfits, and plantains.
She recited:
house,
plate,
žuvis*
She was instructed to insert herself
innocuously into another distilled
generation. The professor exclaimed:
Go to the sand, reject its ilk with wings! Shred the documents in the sea!
And this was an epoch
or era, in which we lost our vertebrae.
Me in your palm-estuary–all cherry stems and swizzles.
*Lithuanian: “fish”
Lina ramona Vitkauskas is the author of Spiny Retinas (Mutable Sound, 2014); Professional Poetry (White Hole Press, 2013); A Neon Tryst (Shearsman Books, 2013); Honey is a She (Plastique Press, 2012); and The Range of Your Amazing Nothing (Ravenna Press, 2010).
She is the recipient of the Henry Miller Memorial Library Ping Pong Journal Prize (selected by Eleni Sikelianos) and The Poetry Center of Chicago’s Juried Reading Award (selected by Brenda Hillman).
Publications include Spork, Coconut, The Awl, DIAGRAM, Tarpaulin Sky, The Chicago Review, The Toronto Quarterly–among many others.
With Larry Sawyer, she has co-edited milk magazine (since 1999). She has also served as a part-time faculty member at the Chicago School of Poetics for 2011-2013. Her website is here .