‘triptych’
— Joyce Chong
our families fractured together. our children forked tongues and oil-stained eyes their fingers prunes from treading water.
This week, a triptych poem (in Menacing Hedge) from Simone Person that moves like a timeline, highlighting the origins and eventual dissipation of a relationship. Person uses rich and dynamic language, breathing life into moments of intimacy, growing distance, and apathy.
this is a compliment to the sinful excess of me. the generous belly. the overflowing arms. the spillage of my thighs. endless.
The imagery of self shifts in weight between the sections, first a gauzy husk, then defined as unending excess, and then something more encompassing, and less easily made simile. Repetition is what ties these individual sections together. Metaphors are done and then undone in the end, recollected into a new meaning, the eventual deterioration between two people its own sort of alchemy. What it leaves behind is a mixture of the self and the past, the things we take with us and the things we release back into the world.
let me float out of the window, slip under the door, boil over, tread water. i scrub your fingerprints from my crooks.