What's a Prose Poem to Do

I—a habitual writer of sequences, and particularly of untitled prose poem sequences—have been trying to write an Individual Poem. I’m interested in the single moment, but I distrust it. So I met myself halfway in this playlist and looked for prose poems with titles, whose main unit was the punctuated sentence. We start with Yona Harvey’s “Q.," whose sentences catch Harvey’s wonderful & particular rhythm, and with Ashley Toliver’s exquisite emotional miniature, “Housekeeping.” But, as usually happens when I write with constraints, they crack a bit by the end. In Jenny Xie’s haibun “Corfu” we see how a line break differently holds tension from the sentence, and in Trace Peterson’s funny and whip-smart HRT poem “The Valleys are so Lush and Steep” the propulsive energy of the sentence travels across each section break. Each of these poems find potential in the focused attention to the texture of their language that a prose form provides.

Q.

One of the four Royal Stars is watching over me. Yeah, I’m blessed in these times of nervous weather. The leaves chill in a bundle then scatter like police, off to the next doorstep. They don’t step, they don’t faze me. These jeans could hold three men. But it’s just one of me, girl. Only Son. Only Sound. Only Seer. All this green to gold to red to orange is just theater. I’m the Real. Keep your eyes on the Navigator of Snow and Infinite Gray. I rock these boots all year. What a storm got to do with me? Who knows the number of strolls to heaven? Not that I’m thinking on it. The Heavens know my real name. But you can call me Q. Quicker than Q. But, anyway. Certain things a man keeps to himself. Jesus wept. So I don’t. The past is for people who like to play things over and over. Me, I’m on to the next song. Listen to my own Head Symphony, to the Royal Stars. The colors, they thrill me, they fuel these legs.

HOUSEKEEPING

Under enormous strictures the salt hinges, becomes a fold. Underneath the canopy I dressed in white like stitches were anathema to waking. A hush at the collar makes binding notes. You smear the water. Past the pointed periphery, out past the lake notes miming the subject. I stand up straight like a clasp on the light boards, catching favor. In the daytime, nothing lingers. Pull all the maps inside.

WHATEVER KEEPS YOU OUT OF HELL

I’d sublimate; or I’d balk (over what’s missing). The “basis” for color in a situation is what something adds to it, to the situation; to be specific is to have authority, a shape against the flames. What’s your song, big boy? Location’s where you decide what you saw.

I SECRETED AND WANTED TO SEE THE BEAUTIFUL SHUTTERS AT THE WINDOWS

Girl C is supposed to be hard at work today but she keeps missing her stops, slipping. As the train falls out of view once again, she returns to her world of desire, instead of the world of transport and commuting and punctuality. She allows herself to float into the passenger car, and her pockets empty themselves and her clothing flies off-screen as per instructions provided one hundred years ago. One hundred years ago is when the windows on the train cars used to have shutters. And beyond those beautiful shutters there used to be one hundred bells in one hundred towers. They rang to announce, all too loudly and all too regularly, the secretions of the girls floating in and out of the town.

ON THE RESEMBLANCE OF SOME FLOWERS TO INSECTS

A smoky vessel drifts east like a slippery elixir. By simple rotation night collapses with its head in the dirt, though from the heights it appears more like cubist swagger. Suddenly curtains. What lives in a room takes on the spirit of the room. This is true even of television. Imagine deciding the gulley of life will follow as if choosing breakfast over diligent labor. I don’t remember my first brush with pollen, yet I’ve watched words flower sideways across your mouth. In a month we’ll be dizzily older. Moths will leave singed paper on the stoop. Is this my design? An ant crosses my shadow so many times looking for its crumb, I think it’s me who’s needlessly swaying. Its path is busy eloquence while I’m merely armed, like a chair leaving the scent of large things on the breeze.

ELEGY

My grandfather’s grave in scorched grass has two names in the gravestone’s granite: one with strokes—silent and once forbidden; the other lettered—a stowaway vowel between one aspirate, one liquid. Speech wears the written in the speaker’s absence to stay the sound & breath’s passing. I read that the wood, for Thoreau, was resonator Sundays when towns tolled bells—Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord. Pines with resin reverbed in sap what wind sent. A Chinese immigrant, on his Pacific-crossing, carried coaching papers for the memorizing. Approaching the island station, these pages were tossed to sea. A moon’s light in a ship’s wake might make a similar papertrail. My grandfather, aboard at twelve, practiced a paper-name.  What ensued was a debt of sound.

CORFU

To the north and to the west: the dark tips of cypress. Corfu in the slow math of July, and this reservoir of fear running low. The island has two hard-boiled hills. The bus descends one of them, blaring folk ballads. Houses the color of custard, some burnt. A Greek Orthodox monastery where even female cats can't enter. I've never set foot on this island before, but all day a familiar version of myself insists like a plain sweat stain against my back.

Pickpocketed days ago in France, all my dollars and euros gone. Yesterday, I landed in an airport so small I could see from one end to the other.

I've grown lean from only eating the past.

One line through customs,
and the plane impossibly close to the sea.
No ceremony in any of it.

THE VALLEYS ARE SO LUSH AND STEEP

I have not been having an easy HRT experience for a trans gal, especially when it comes to blocking testosterone so my body can develop properly in response to estrogen.

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Spironolactone gave me brain fog, so to block T, I switched to Finasteride.

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The blocker dose of Finasteride made me too sleepy to function, so I switched to Progesterone.

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Progesterone had some nice effects but it made me loopy and had a kind of thought-freezing effect, so I switched to Dutasteride.

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Dutasteride made me too sleepy to function and caused me to phase shift into a fourth dimension at unexpected moments, so I switched to Walzanone.

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Walzanone helped ease off my body hair, but it gave me unanticipated telekenetic powers which would cause a table to fly crashing acrosss the room when I got upset with someone, so I switched to Benefiontin.

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Benefiontin seemed to be working for a while and I could genuinely concentrate, until I slowly became aware that it was making my skin fluorescent green and stretchable over any nearby hardwood surfaces. Punk rock anamorphosis had ended long ago, so I switched to Penalzombion.

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While I enjoyed the ultra-feminine high that Penalzombion enfaulked from my kinesthetic being, it had the unfortunate side effect of causing me to hate most poetry I hear, or maybe that was just poetry. In any case, the constant sore throat or what they call the "Penalzombion engorgement" became highly inconvenient when I needed to sing impromptu arias for job talks on composition theory. So I switched to Rubicon.

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Though not technically a blocker, Rubicon had several advantages in terms of how it personified and mirrored my t-levels internally. A short-range tactical missile flew by in search of its drone-targeted recipient. Testosterone self-reflectiveness on Rubicon invaded my being on a coding level of intensity to the point where rows of shark teeth swallowed every time management skill I ever learned. There was no going back. I decided that Rubicon was too much of a simultaneously alienated and intimately ski mask experience. So I switched to Novascotia.

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The best side effect of Novascotia was its remoteness. Though it made me feel slightly alienated around other poets, I did manage to get a lot of writing done. However, in the process I lost all sense of reality and missed my grant deadlines for the fourth time. A mouse ear grew out of my hand. Peach cobbler. So I switched to Nepotismapolitan.

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With Nepotismapolitan I definitely engrotted some anti-testosterone connections in the entertainment world, which had me at an advantage when passing as entertainmentally female, but my pores became enormous. When I think back I wonder if Nepotismapolitan was taunting me the whole time. Gam tumescent wing growth polited out of the sinking vessel. Due to interaction warnings I couldn't eat too much processed food anymore and my T levels were still too high, so I switched to Wellmasteride.

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I liked the feeling of cosmic omnipotence corresponding with complete and utter abjection that Wellmasteride gave me, being at once a unique delicate flower/snowflake and a humanistic reproconfection seeking air time like every other platelet in the bloodstream, but it made me inconveniently leery of discussions about trigger warnings and delaying puberty in children. Pang of detained weekend fixture turned permanent yawp. I stopped thugging around in my endocrine blotter with Wellmasteride, and instead turned to Jaimeleecuritsol.

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Jaimeleecurtisol made me witty and urbane. Being around me was like an episode of female Frasier slightly sped up. But soon the crash happened and we were in a recession. Jaimeleecurtisol caused me to scream and scream at the horrible truth coming at me about how people really perceived my gender suddenly rushing at me around street corners. So I switched to Smallpondilaxone.

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Smallpondilaxone made me feel big. For a minute I contemplated calling an agent to discuss my enormous very specialized coupon stash, but I couldn't get out of bed. So next I tried Crepusculane.

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Now the great thing about Crepusculane was that on this one I really felt like myself on five cups of coffee for a few minutes lugging a trampoline up the capital steps past the stone lions that guarded the secret to what's inside increasingly smaller panties I never held any responsibility for, a good place to do research. I made all kinds of appointments to publish poet things and attend everybody's readings in a stacker, almost steroid-like configuration demented with charm. But the hyper-concentration that Crepusculane offers caused me instead to stare at a Grecian Urn for days on end, transfixed by thoughts of lighting up and smoking the latest poet laureate or at least getting a medical prescription for him/her to become culturally all over me. Crepusculane rendered my t-levels nearly invisible as I lay swooning across a Chatterton velvet couch in my garret, but there was no one around but me to serenade, so I switched to Lesbiamine.

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Lesbiamine caused .......................... in peace talks ....................
........................................................................................................
........................... rankled tall girl spat juicer .......................... but
.........................................................................................................
......... looks at your spork ............... like a gorgon, tufts of ...........
.........................................................................................................
kissing us in the museum .............................................................
......................... making me .......... attachment weekend blocker 
.........................................................................................................
my leg around your ........................................................................
.............................. wetter, a death ................... bank holiday itch 
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clasped ………………….....……..…… in a restaurant booth ..............
...... or vamp stamped ............... something chocolate .................
.........................................................................................................
................................. anxiety being unsexy ……....…….....…...........
.................. and you need lateness …………........………….................
destorying me ................................................................................
......................................................... too intense ............................

like the crushed flower. I couldn't take all the ellipses anymore and they were intruding into my dissertation writing time, so I switched to Pastoralwenchtrin.

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I think I am going to stick with Pastoralwenchtrin for awhile and see where this goes. It's quiet here and there are sheep and no wolves masquerading as bears climbing the hillside of an apple danish I bought from my student loan debt ceiling. As long as I pay the credit card bills by end of the month and get my name changed in time for the church basement sale, maybe I can find a way to live. As my body reaches a kind of equilibrium, I am trying to have as small a percentage of me as possible be fabricated as method acting and as great a possibility as a pink skull half-shaven skyline be real. The valleys are so lush and steep. How to end not wanting to be myself being not quite myself.