Arousal

Awakenings born from explorations of Eloquence: The Conjuring Power of Words

Photo by USGS on Unsplash

i.

A pyramid of bodies, stacked one by one.
I wore the red blouse you stole from Nordstroms.

The red blouse you stole from Nordstroms
understood the language of arousal.

What is the language of arousal?
What is the origin of a blood moon?

The origin of a blood moon
once believed in the walls of this house.

I once believed in the walls of this house.
A sharp blade slices the skin of a throat.

A blade sharpens the throat of my skin,
slow whiskey rise of letting the ink spill.

Once the whiskey sets and the ink spills,
a pyramid of bodies, aroused one by one.

The lines of this poem once lived far apart from each other, stood in disparate camps, not part of the same world view. They were divided by location, one or two resided in failed or abandoned poems, a few lived in random journal writings, some on the outskirts in a pile of sticky notes. They were once divided by context, origin, dreams for their future, but they came together by a forced circumstance. Something was evoked.

Modeled after Jericho Brown’s unique form called the duplex, this poem was created by gathering up individual lines from their various places, mixing them together blindly (cut up snips of paper folded or turned over), then randomly pulling them one by one so they could stand next to each other and talk. Once talking, the duplex form asks for repetition but with slight variation, as the case for true conversation necessarily goes.

The poem arrived then without forethought, like arousal often does. It wasn’t until this forced, yet random convergence of lines happened that “Arousal” as a title came to be. It named the conversation that emerged between the lines.

What is arousal?

It is alive in me now. We’ve come to only think of this word as a reference to sexual stimulation, which it certainly is, but that’s not the only thing alive…