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from The only name we can call it now is not its only name






We know it is Thursday because we wake up on flat space, having been prolonged on flat space, in comfort and humor situated, not walking water.

Our desire to begin is not strong enough to exit this flatness, so we know it as an atypical Thursday of our days.

We are all syncing up in temperature that inversely mimics and then teases out vertical weather.

From incubation of a centralized system, before we know it, the inequality of thermal dispersion is a space where we can actually meet.

Theoretically, we agree on equal parts comprising entities of similar value, but we agree more that we do not live in a theoretical incubator.

Our pods are real.

At the world’s mercy, Thursday is a reminder of how we feel, how we wonder.

To keep this place from its temporary reality as a cold house, we flirt with ourselves.

We flirt, too, with the notion of what it means to keep sending parts of inwardness out into the world and the world is never empty totally because of this.

We feel we are at the world’s mercy even when playing the role of dominatrix.

Sound and space are inversely connected to centrality, they very nearly invert each other’s centrality, too, until sound becomes space’s negative theory and vice versa.

On Thursday, we begin to coil around our own flat space again and the calming voice where no persona is real.

So we might stay.

On Thursday, we decide against a monthly shower as we feel our perspiration less metabolized now in dormant Thursday weather theory.

We decide afternoon is better and it takes time but within an hour we are more attuned to our own calming voice.

Unlike this house, unlike our previous endeavors, we are flirting with what may be mistakenly construed as biomimicry.

It is a mistake because we are cast again and again as such by calm which is not one isolated form outside the house but rather an immeasurable entity altogether.

It would seem obvious this relationship of isolated forms and casting, however, even our closest friends sometimes get it wrong.

Incapable then of keeping up with conversation with other jaywalkers whom we often feel most at ease with, we return from relaxing.

In fact, before this Thursday, after last Thursday, during the exact space of last week, we meditated, our house was kept.

We observed how much more sleep we required versus our peers, how slow our speech measured in comparison.

Our mistake was to try to keep up, when excess energy is not spent eventually equally even amongst peers who share ability to describe the conditions of their pods.

Our form of excess energy may be more usefully spent in calming blocks of isolation, rigorously fighting depression.

Eventually, it is possible, mimicry becomes nearly impossible, as sound and space are similarly neck and neck isolated from headquarters.

We observe which quips enter and exit and approximately at what pace.

Without acuity, fluidity, or commiserate pace, we feel loss and we enter deeper into observation.

Matter of factly, we desperately relaxed.

Against the background of disaster, some of us still drank our usual cup of morning coffee.

For a while, we found comfort in this carving singularity, a comfort not to be confused for confidence.

If we were presented with the opportunity to walk amongst peach trees, we would move our bodies perhaps vigorously and then say “ok.”

Whether or not we would show up is no guarantee.

If we were eventually given the option of coming out of our hole, it would seem more possible perhaps if we joined various groups, if we took lessons, if we learned that the various group members hailing from different locations and also carved vigorously in the morning faced depression.

It would seem obvious perhaps that we might say “ok,” that we continued.

If we imagine a relationship between the invitation to walk amongst peach trees and the banquet hall, the walk amongst some must supersede the invitation itself.

And so our recognition that the invitation itself becomes irrelevant becomes more and more relevant in our present state.

We certainly recognize the design to be a potential meeting space between the vertical and the horizontal and of this we have no regrets.

Our recognition that there may be seating too close to the window, that this proximity may be unproductive, keeps us flattened down.

At first, it makes the invitation less attractive and then our agency, which binds us to our recognition of a centrality that moves to follow us, reminds us of a free woman.

It makes the invitation less attractive until we are reminded that the thermal conditions of the chair’s position might be related to the bed but the bed is closer in spirit and technology to the jaywalk, frequently, than the desk.

So the invitation is garlanded, not acute.

We used to be moved by these distances whereas right now, we just think about the space between two entirely non-advanced thoughts.

The space between meditative units often appear to us in a wet dream as totally non-moving undistinguished thoughts.
                                                                                                                  What moves is the space between them, however unwarranted, and our wish is the degree of incline necessary for the sound to be carved out of tetrahedron space.

We do not imagine a riot happening as a result of this dissemination though we accidentally go there, we supersede the storm which supersedes the riot terms.

The sectioning gradually swells and horizontally we try to measure our speech amongst peers until we go back to the gesture of the figure eight.

It would seem that we mimicked the form of a figure eight or a helix and we failed in this gesture and at no point then did we consider the coil, it was truly different.

The space interrupts the sound and this interruption depends on how we approach space’s carving.

It sounds very obvious but we have made this our dwelling and it is our wish to continue because for us it is very difficult.

The house is cold enough where we don’t have to worry about peach juice spoiling if left uncovered on the counter at room temperature.

It will only get more difficult.

We are not that kind, we are not that kind of community that had the foresight to protect ourselves and mark certain areas as off-limits from the get-go.

So it took time and as always a surprise or two for the calming voice without excess energy easily discernible to take hold.

A calming voice without jealousy, at least not easily discernible, a calming voice unrelated even to the asexual bellydancer.

Almost charting through the moves, our calming voice was almost once shy although comfortable and inoffensively so, unlike someone with no idea.

The community is filled with people who aren’t closest friends with
each other and the community is not marked by peace.

Maybe certain areas were never intentionally protected and also maybe we have forgotten whatever came before the calm or we were too young.

The community speaks of withholding and the community is comprised of community organizers and the ladder outside one community member’s house becomes a shared mental ladder of envisioned tactics.

It becomes clear that none of the group members want to abandon the withholding efforts but some of the group members are ready to just self-mend.

Necessarily, the idea of a gift economy is not pure ideation, otherwise it is all fruitless.

Where the community stands on ideas such as moving and mending and worth has been a clear motivational factor in formulating the gift economy idea, which is as much for each other as it is a tactic itself of withholding.

So we named the invitation a seditious invitation and the calming voice was probably already nearly done incubating.

How can we turn this inwardness to the graceful age without being suspect to ourselves?

It is then we feel at a distance from ourselves so we look blotted out in turn, so we walk away to come back through the other side of the ladder.

As if the free woman continued to show us the way through, we have no choice.

Our community broadcast recalls and is recalled by the outward community and we notice the coiling effect.

If we make three separate calls to the same office morning, noon, and night, and no one answers, we leave messages that recalled fear.

It is not our wish to offend anyone’s sensibilities but we are neither averse to detournement.

If it is necessary to invoke ideas of collateral damage, we will do so without fear because we are ready.

It is common knowledge that meditative practices originate as meditative tactics in nature, on the battlefields of nature, and that these tactics not only respond actively and equally to deprivation and overload, but also calm the nervous system.

As we commit more to the singularity of the group, we distance ourselves from our closest friends.

Inevitably, we would bring conversations into speeches and openings.

Can anybody extraordinary speak intimately with the Buddha?

So the one confined had been horizontal in the energetic Buddha pose as a source of protection and it was acquired in the depths of a naked isolation.

The coincidence here represents a parallelism of unnatural states and deprivation.

Can we explain mysterious acts of self-mending under conditions as cold as this?

With terms of endearment, we propose an opening that defies explanation, an opening that renders moot the need to question why the propaganda is so clear.

In a controlled environment where faith-building may be obvious, it only takes two generations for full acceptance without message questioning.

We impose our own systems of faith onto those who live without a messenger and our justification includes poverty.

From a controlled environment, we move out into the open air and what was obvious becomes apparent as something that was taken for granted.

What previously occurred as growth in merely two directions, the sign of which was the geranium, now becomes obviously vulnerable to greater input.

When the internal speaker draws out from the magnetism of the two directional geranium a faith-building speech, they go closer towards something more similar to control.

We can move further away and then when we have changed clothes we can go closer and closer again, not to the two geraniums, but actually to the one who the speaker is made for.

Out of the controlled environment, the groundwork for the separatist movement is set like a jellybean or obstetric jelly.

Without community foresight, in the building of the controlled environment, the damage is done and the only one who thrives in this controlling hold is the one who exits with what some perceive as seditious speech, the one who parallels a Buddha.

Walking back for the first time in a long time, we are surprised to be met by two of our closest friends in a rented house.





Valerie Hsiung is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and the author of several poetry and hybrid writing collections, including The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath, forthcoming 2023), To love an artist (Essay Press, 2022), selected by Renee Gladman for the 2021 Essay Press Book Prize, outside voices, please (CSU), selected for the 2019 CSU Open Book Prize, Name Date of Birth Emergency Contact (The Gleaners), YOU & ME FOREVER (Action Books), and e f g (Action Books). Her writing has appeared in print (The Believer, Chicago Review, The Nation, New Delta Review, digital vestiges), in flesh (Treefort Music Festival, Common Area Maintenance, The Poetry Project), in sound waves (Montez Press Radio, Hyle Greece), and other forms of particulate matter. Her work has been supported by Foundation for Contemporary Arts, PEN America, Lighthouse Works, and public streets and trails she has walked on and hummed along for years. Born in the Year of the Earth Snake and raised by Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives in the mountains of Colorado where she teaches as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing & Poetics at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa.