Amy King in Spaltung

 

Gazing through the Cotoneaster
                                    —after Fellini

One day I had noticed that I was the director.
I had said goodbye to Giulietta by way
of a confession nailed and left for Catholic
mass in the middle of her prepositional ocean.
She churned my face through kaleidoscopic
camera angles. I was like a wash on spin cycle,
loathing then admiring interview poseurs,
albeit the honest debacles. I loved being among
seldom-screened people. I loved seeing myself
as oracle or circle, based on which prophet fit
the harbor with ships, back-to-back rowboats
called plastic camera vision (we were leaning
toward sight in plastic again). Terror is terror
in its purest form: nothing stills the threat
pronounced via telephone. A genetic whir
of two hands wringing sound over
broken-necked murmurs is not an Italy,
is not a one-eyed periscope hanging feathers
to dry on asphalt stones near a city's ocean.
The seasons cross their schizophrenic lovers half
like a continent, halfway to you who
were gifted as math, standing in the toe
of a boot, these lands of forgetful geography.


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