laura carter

Apokata-

–stasis: a going out without not looking in. Beginning is necessary, always, but not toujours. This is what you left, you say to your friend.
A lake is alternately something, well, plumaged. There is more than one way to read it: as fullness, or as, then, fullness.
Ghosts of italics are sometimes a comfort, sometimes not.
A sentence wants to be kata-: a going out. In someone else’s sentence, perhaps your hair would be a different color. Do you remember your old religion? one friend asks. It is anger for you now. You want to know how she remembers it. You had long forgotten.
An interior is not a second body. Is it a moth? You’d like to think so. Without flame, but only light to guide you.
If this world can open again, there’s a place where this does happen, inside. You never knew yourself until I looked farther out and farther in. A series of excursions, belonging to time but knowing difference between time and you.
A morning is a mirror. Night is a vase of silk. If you look into night for long enough, you find an alternative to a day of being. If you look at day long enough, you may need drink to help you find your voice. A voice is not a partial object.
Unless: find time again, find a voice. Outside of you, a radio awaits. A time enters. These things take time, for there are no things. Unless there are.
And there never was a fire. You believe a song: There are no fires of hell; there is only mercy. But you know this doesn’t apply in all circumstances. Sometimes people make their own paths.
When you were an ingénue, you thought of learning to lie in verse. Then, you gave up verse. There was no more need to turn. Everything begins with a story, but it ends so quietly. Do you want to rage?
You became new for a while, let good light in. A problem of a house. A problem of lovers. And what to even call those you’ve known un-entirely? A problem of remembering what to tell. A problem of not-telling.
Apo- will seek you when you least expect it. You can turn away and toward this world, sure. That’s part of how apo- likes to play. Or you can enjoin yourself to apo- as if in a daze that can’t be held. You used to do this more; you found it comforting.
Laid down weary and unfathomable mystery lay down together in a field. Friends approach. They become something different. There are no words.
Fidelity approaches. There are no words that fidelity can say but its own. How lovely! Is this how a robin is birthed? Some might say. But at an end of desire, there’s no hunger for lies. That’s how it works.
Except if you’re keeping something; everyone is always keeping a truth.
If there is a gospel of wealth, you know no part of that narrative. To be literal. To be alive to real: desert? A bit of ocean gets in, escapes a grasp of time. That’s good and desirable. But this world is not water, nor is it made from plenty.
You cannot remember the last time you set your hair on fire.
You cannot remember an earliest film. Erased. You think of what an early film would look like, and then you turn from it. You are no archivist of fire and old lace, though some may think otherwise. That is not apo-. Apo- is something new.
Kata- brings world and friendship and love and peace, not without cost. You love this kata-. You hold it dear.
Laid down weary and fathomable obvious lay down together in a field. You hold them both. You hold obvious like a glove that can’t be worn down by transfer.
And then perhaps night approaches. And then perhaps sex. And then perhaps a story of a world. And then perhaps something different. And then perhaps an end of unknowing but only because made plain.
And then perhaps love.
And then perhaps a turn of words, the only turn this world can know. Revolution is a revolver, and love is a sign. In a red hut of years gone by, some still struggle. You wonder what they are fighting against.
And then perhaps love.
And then perhaps some had learned to hate. And then perhaps years, pressed into flower’s pistils and released at a right time. Not this, you say. You have no way to make that go off again.
And then perhaps non-identity of resolution’s failure. And then perhaps going into deep.
And then perhaps a sheen wears off, like a child’s garment once worn to a baptism. Someone holds her hand; it’s okay; you’re not how you were, but you’re real now.
And then perhaps something fades. A signifier? Desire to storm out into an everything? Perfectly natural kata-, java-infused. A signifier feels itself, too much. How words mean is entirely different, though plaited or unplaited by some contradiction.
And then perhaps love. And then perhaps un-sheen of real.

Laura Carter lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where she earned her MFA in 2007. She has published many chapbooks of poetry and even more individual poems.