JAMI MACARTY, FEATURED IN THE OCEAN STATE REVIEW
Asterisk to What Branches in the Perfect Including
Act so that there is no use in a centre
—Gertrude Stein
*
When away from soap, I rub into my hands creosote.
*
These odd, slow, own hours I
imagine Worm Moon’s down-ear shudder.
Earthworms, soil’s pedestrians
prepared for what’s theirs to bear.
*
My syrinx impulse to ask you, sir, not to spit
into anything
that is public. The air. The street.
The water where we each row our solitary
boats through the waves of a strange, collective sea.
Were they seeds you spit
I would want them planted, for sunflowers to grow
beyond beyond.
*
I dream she put her hand through mist.
Her hand is mist.
*
I sit in the car after its sat in the sun for the morning.
There is nowhere to drive to that is open.
*
Your hand when you hold mine when I hold your hand
retains warmth.
*
Lift this rock: collared lizard
tail flick.
*
On the trail, my foot breaks
a brittle bush branch. My hand picks
a turpentine flower.
Neither my intent. Both my regret.
*
This female black-chinned hummingbird stills on a yet leafed
mesquite. Gray-green back body, a nest band
indents her near-white breast.
My body in a labor
as hers
to still.
*
Sun’s burning filter
exposes our trouble-moorings. Black-chinned and I
becoming bounded by the branch, the light
that nows her partner’s name-sake gorget.
Without the right light for iridescence, his throat may look black.
*
More hikers with bandanas masking mouths, noses.
Our incognito collective walks a desert
punctuated by the exclamation points of saguaros.
A wake of turkey vultures takes advantage of updrafts
to catch the scent of death.
*
Blue eggs
loll in twos in curve-billed thrasher nests.
*
The edge of the circle
accounted for
allows
the center
what meaning there is.
*
Center points to periphery.
That’s center’s use, Gertrude.
*
A grapefruit after
avocado on hospitable rice cake.
This grapefruit, picked by
my love’s hands, a bright everything orb
lit by the mysteries of sun’s citrus regimen.
*
Tendering yellow and green rinds, I startle
a Cooper’s hawk off its perch
hovering the compost.
*
I bend to a cereus bloom that requires I bend in attention.
The light over my neighbor’s front entry casts
a heart shadow.
*
The toll confrontation with violent communication takes.
Death in the morning.
She on whom breast cancer took its toll.
Death in the evening.
*
No sight of the Cooper’s hawk for four days.
Nor the desert cottontail.
Mourning doves line the wire.
The sun drops off the horizon.
*
Dream dolphins
dark-breeching Atlantic shore.
A cork pop before submerging.
The dolphins’ collective breath through
which I release dead emotion.
*
First sunflower
discovered on the dawn trail.
Kneel-worthy yellow.
*
Accretion of yellow as I walk.
Across the arroyo, a solo coyote
watches from palo verde shadow.
Jami Macarty on “Asterisk to What Branches in the Perfect Including”:
From October 2019 to May 2020, poet Sean Singer and I wrote variously lined stanzas back and forth between where he was in New York and where I was in British Columbia and Arizona. Sean’s and my irregular-at-first correspondence took on special meaning and gained intensity during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic when we wrote the majority of the lines in the thirty-seven-page Google Doc we made together. Then, our correspondence faded for reasons as mysterious as those surrounding its beginning. I kept going and during the following month, I began to gather some of the lines I had written to see what and who was alive in them. The presences I discovered asserted themselves, becoming “Asterisk to What Branches in the Perfect Including.”
The Gertrude Stein epigraph came from Sean, who included it in one of his stanzas during our correspondence, though slightly misrepresented; he had it as: “Act like there is no use in a center.” The sentence, the first in the section “Rooms” in Tender Buttons (1914), as Stein wrote it: “Act so that there is no use in a centre.” The difference between choosing “like” and “so that” is vast in Stein’s world. Circles, centers, and dis/connection were part of the ethos out of which my written responses to Sean emerged, so there was a ding when Ms. Stein’s sentence suggested itself as an opening note and central cog for the poem.
Plus, including the quote allowed me to honor Sean as a writing partner. Thank you to Sean Singer for writing collaboratively with me!
I dedicate “Asterisk to What Branches in the Perfect Including” to poet Michelle Mitchell-Foust, author of Imago Mundi (2005) and Circassian Girl (2001), both from Elixir Press. To Michelle who was “grand in the world.”
“My friend is smaller now, and if I held my camera up
to her, she would give off enough light to hover
pocket-sized in my hand, and grand in the world.”
—from “Camera Eulogia,” by Michelle Mitchell-Foust
Jami Macarty gratefully recognizes Native Nations of the West—especially the Coast Salish and O’odham—as the traditional and rightful owners of lands where she has the great privilege to live and learn—as a teacher at Simon Fraser University, as an independent editor, and as a writer of essays, reviews, and poetry.
Jami is the author of the ecofeminist poetry collection The Minuses, a Mountain / West Poetry Series title published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University (March 2020) and the winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award–Poetry Arizona.
Jami’s three chapbooks of poetry include: Instinctive Acts (Nomados Literary Publishers, 2018), which contemplates immigration, identity, and place in Vancouver, British Columbia’s Downtown Eastside; Mind of Spring (No. 22, Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), a walking meditation, contemplating social, cultural, environmental, and personal mechanisms of war, accompanied by the Palo Verde, Arizona State Tree, and winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award; her first chapbook, Landscape of The Wait (Finishing Line Press, 2017), is a poetic response to her nephew William’s car accident and year-long coma.