from As If
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I am run around as if with rope, imagine being all tied up,
unable to go anywhere but it’s fine. The tiny person says she is a ghost haunting me and I believe it when in the middle of the night I get up for seltzer and cannot quiet my mind of terrible happenings. Put the thought on a boat and push it toward the horizon line, they say. Wave now as it floats away. Or there’s a box to pack and ship. I move through the motions, an unforgettable dance, though it never really works. I wake feeling I am no good but for my gentleness, my tendency to lie right down where I am and make a home of it. My debts blink around me like lightning bugs, but it’s not that time of year. Time becomes boxed and labeled. You tell me you want to live forever, chewing on ice. |
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from As If
On the ugly white couch I am crying with the sun
over me like a father burning all his Cubs memorabilia
in the driveway after yet another loss. The thing about not drinking is —
and then a gimlet in my grip. They say to visualize depression as a plate,
broken. Ripped-up bill. Ash. I mean, I want to. I want to
mark my next dissolving on the calendar. Break it down.
Are the parts of me younger or timid or taking control?
She asks me to tell her more about the thoughts and there’s nothing
bloody there, so I don’t have to lie. It’s enough to say the tulips
turned like an ankle. To try to phrase it as a gift. There aren’t maps
for how blocks of light move past me locally. I grow used to feeling
like silk, a single strand. What is my work when sometimes
my hand doesn’t feel like my hand? As if
I could believe it was someone else touching me.
over me like a father burning all his Cubs memorabilia
in the driveway after yet another loss. The thing about not drinking is —
and then a gimlet in my grip. They say to visualize depression as a plate,
broken. Ripped-up bill. Ash. I mean, I want to. I want to
mark my next dissolving on the calendar. Break it down.
Are the parts of me younger or timid or taking control?
She asks me to tell her more about the thoughts and there’s nothing
bloody there, so I don’t have to lie. It’s enough to say the tulips
turned like an ankle. To try to phrase it as a gift. There aren’t maps
for how blocks of light move past me locally. I grow used to feeling
like silk, a single strand. What is my work when sometimes
my hand doesn’t feel like my hand? As if
I could believe it was someone else touching me.
Anna Meister is author of the chapbook Nothing Granted (dancing girl press) & holds an MFA in poetry from New York University. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Tinderbox, |tap| magazine, Kenyon Review, & elsewhere. Anna lives in Des Moines, IA & at www.anna-meister.com.
Tokihiro Sato was born in 1957 in Sakata, Yamagata Prefecture, Japan. Trained as a sculptor, he has been using photography since the late 1980s to express his ideas about light and space. In his best-known series, Photo Respiration, tiny points of light or illuminated lines record his movements through space. Using a large-format camera set on a tripod and timed for exposures that may last from one to three hours, he moves quickly through the described space. When shooting in daylight, he flashes a mirror at the sun. At night, or indoors, he uses a flashlight. The resulting photographs capture exquisitely detailed scenes punctuated by pinpoints or linear patterns of light that depict the artist’s presence but not his image. For more than thirty years, Sato has exhibited at galleries and museums throughout the world. His photographs are in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Cleveland Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; and many other important institutions.