G-NT3806KSJP
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Return
              Unsettlement

 


                              Fore                  middle               background
                                        the camera           or the eye                             
                    pans across                depth of                banana leaves
                          Spanish moss       begonia       snows down

                                            Thing is
                                                         worlding’s so long been wrong
                                  re-do
                                         turn around                      come back
                             insist                           A move
                                              Pauline Oliveros listens
                                                                                  as ever
                                                   this body throws down
                                                                                       hole
                                                                                               from the
                                    wails
                                                              in fetal position
                                       wrap               
                                   What is                                    a thing
                                                always returning
                                                   to thingself?

                                                                                            A friend afar
                                  knows it isn’t okay
                                                               but how is she not to awaken
                                    not to wrench             harder nor rouse
                                                                                   from kneaded sleep

                              Decades to re-learn        epigenetically
                                    how to re-root    in  place     to re-main
                                                     re-order           re-orient      re-make
                                           re-  expressing intensive force

                                    brittle leavings of tomato      jalapeño

                                                  dog days canícula      sun             burns

                             “The disconnection feeling is deep”
                                                said the potted plant to the limp dick
                                                                              ecstatic   not lesser than              

                               An artist friend     came to our house late
                                              clumped the pots into an altar
                                   prayer for the cut-out leaders to fall
                                                        paper slumps on the mantle
                                                                                    into oyster mounds
                                 arrowheads        unseeded cede
                                         nothing                               never consented
                            rise murky and     unencumbered                

                                                                                                For once
                                   the manager to be more troubled
                                                                      than the waitress

                   The clay says     “I know how to unsettle the settlement”
                                                                  settle   from the word sit
                                      meaning also re-concile    re-pair
                                          To re-ckon with sitting
                                    still                        languages of intimacies
                                              intimates                     signified
                                                               voiced or signs
                                    A clump                       A knot of carrizo

                                         A spring whispers an earful
                             inside                        intimidation                    timid
                                                               flows like a crystal creek through
                                                    sand murmurs

                                   “Time is a shifting liquid”
                                                       said Lorenzo Thomas
                            “a shame / Nobody Understands /
                                                                        shy”

                                              Summer         and the living is Gulf Coast
                        okra     malabar            bananas                      papayas
                            
                                     Winter        on re-peat ushers
                                                                  in gray and brown
                                          split sub-tropical drapery
                         In Bay City a horizon                a line of cut paint
                                             the same knife Forrest Bess used
                                                  to open a portal
                                                                   in his body       our bent future

                              Ritual      Cecilia Vicuña says        a manner to stop
                                                                                             or pause a
                                 reminder                           water spurts
                                                         gush       

                        An altar wrapped in perished leafery         A shack toppled
                                    to the marshes                                          A screen
                            array of                    perfectly arranged       grounds

                                   A time         as ever  for
                                                      well-aimed undercuts






JD Pluecker works with language: writes, translates, organizes, interprets, and creates things in spaces with others. Their most recent translation from Spanish into English is Luis Felipe Fabre’s Writing with Caca—a biography of the 1920s Mexican writer Salvador Novo—which investigates the potentials of writing as a process of excretion. JD worked for many years with the language justice and linguistic-material experimentation collectives of Antena, which closed in the first year of the pandemic in 2020. JD started making zines as a teenager and still makes their own work public in the form of limited-run books.