ARIANNE TRUE
from exhibits
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it is implicit you will not touch a painting. risk marring the charcoal of a sketch. leave the oil of your skin to tarnish bronze. chip the ridges of caked-on paint or pull threads from the canvas back. I had thought this was implicit. but here I am, rusting and threadbare, chipped and blurry. so I will say.
DO NOT TOUCH THE ARTWORK
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I have been a careful, patient tender. I have spent too long too close to my broken parts today. The edges catch. Once slow and kind, my hands ask to grab hot steel and slam it into the iron stove, again and again and again. I don’t. But such violence hides in my body. I wonder where it goes when I ask it to go home.
fireside
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you know :: you cannot be serious :: as much as you want :: to stop worse yet :|: you might be hard to share with others :: your uncontrollable skin :: can cause serious damage :|: the most severe plague :: helplessness :|: to stop despair :: fingers flex splinters :: bulge rawed skin :: perhaps habits are :: body-focused harm :|: some feel pleasurable :: aware in:dependent :||:
a primer on habit
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ON THE SIDEWALK
most animals eat each other alive
my eyes could not align color into shape
blurred teeth and feet
such everyday consuming
i watched a yellowjacket shear open a grasshopper
leaf-shaded as if a storybook tea
until the grasshopper
stopped kicking you know the kick
the yellowjacket1
which did not sting once
cleaved off two thick back legs
and devoured them
1 Yellowjackets, often mistaken for bees2, are actually a type of predatory wasp, capable of inflicting multiple stings and entirely carnivorous in diet. Some more aggressive species mark victims to pursue them.
2 This is not dissimilar to how your father is often mistaken for a father.
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HOW TO HEAL FROM BRAINWASHING AND REGAIN CONTROL OF YOUR MIND
This is
how they
make you
question
your perception
learn how they
make you hide
your pain can help convince you
better than voices of
your surreal world
you can heal from (here can you heal?) from you can heal
you from heal can heal you can from you you can heal from
you can
detach
if other people
silence your
telling of it
an animal neither squid
nor octopus
when threatened
will bite off the tips
of its bioluminescent
arms and jet away from
those lying beacons
You will feel your mind false
as you come to accept
now
the end of the story
Today
(I have never heard
if they regrow)
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ARIANNE TRUE
Arianne True (Choctaw, Chickasaw) is a queer poet and folk artist from Seattle. She teaches and mentors with Writers in the Schools (WITS), the Seattle Youth Poet Laureate program, and the Young Writers Cohort. Arianne has received fellowships from Jack Straw and the Hugo House and is a proud alum of Hedgebrook and of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She’s currently working on exhibits, a book-length manuscript of experimental, experiential poems, and the poems here are all from the work in progress. You can find more on her website at ariannetrue.com.
To download a printable PDF version of this page, click here.
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A Dozen Nothing 