Self-Portrait as Moon Drowning in Petrichor, Which is to Say my Ribcage Texts While I Drive | Danielle Rose

Or: A pile of utterance. Let us capture examples like accretion; coalesce into something someone will call new. Suggest self-reflection but forget to provide a mirror. Everything is a question of how we see it; everything can be nearer or farther or never-moving like a photograph. Grasp utterance—lips like songs like deepened dry wells. As if we could grasp some condition like wetness; as if the weight of all this water could preclude nothing but more water. No—things do not work this way. Call for something guttural; something visceral like a hawk snatching a rabbit. A rabbit eating grass. All the world’s grasses. I mean to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. To do the thing that is wrong because it is such rightness. Let go. Drowning in petrichor. I mean encountering something heard that lands on your tongue.

Danielle Rose is the author of AT FIRST & THEN (Black Lawrence Press '21.) Her recent work can be found in Palette Poetry, Hobart Pulp & Pithead Chapel.