I've been thinking about the day and how it sliced like a sheet across the sky, the blue water line of the horizon teetering like a saw, like a glimmer of a glass edge. I wonder about my eyes -- about the accuracy of their vision, about the notes I make with my hands, my nails. I am especially attentive to surfaces -- how they are rough or smooth, or hot or cool, and how my own skin is a surface that changes, that you can touch. I am without a winter, without a new year. The things here, if there are changes, are more like rearrangements of predictable weathers. or else, one day it is one way -- extreme -- cold and black -- and the next the blue sky balminess soothes us back into a sort of dreamy submission. I get so much less done here, in California. My own body has become more solid -- in response I think the abundance of air. Looking out into the ocean, there is so much sky, so much space. My lungs feel frail, a pair of dusty wings, a pair of sheer, shallow winds that barely keep my here.

The idea is to make the babies

work; they are so photogenic

and their lungs are so ripe

and pink. All the birds come

falling down, out of the sky

like ashes. A little song sings

a-long like a little rope-gold

lasso. Spinster-whip sinister

sisters, muse-twins conjoined.

Embryos harvested for their

fossil fuels. Blood is a gas

that burns blue as DNA:

genetic pyrotechnics. All

the pink babies go pop!

pop! pop! We're so naked

in our humanity. It's like

we were all just born.

I had a dream last night about resurrection. My hamster was alive; we were wrong about her being dead. I think this was in part a wish-fulfillment dream and in part a sort of shadowy psychic residue left in my brain after watching a sad video of a mother chimpanzee reacting to death of her infant.

There are so many ways in which a bird and a girl are similar.

Of course we all write too much about birds. We write about them because they disappear. We have to figure out a way to be sad about it.

I think briefly of smoke stacks, snow, ash. I fantasize about papering over every surface with pretty patterned paper.

Sleep is like levitation. Girls can levitate. This secret power is explored at slumber parties, but then we all forget.

We used to do back flips on the trampoline. In the dark after drinking warm beer. It seemed we went higher than the pines.

The thing I miss most about South Carolina is the pines. That and the humid, evening air during summer. How the air feels like the cicadas humming. We write too much about cicadas, but why not? I've only written about them once or twice.

I put my name on a list for a baby teddy bear hamster. Her name will be Baroness Petunia Muffin Merriweather and she will sleep in pretty pink air.

I know that I am alive and I try not to forget this but to stay in the space of "knowing" is difficult. today on the beach there was all this pink. K and I walked and when we turned around there was this sudden rush and it isn't knowing but feeling and in that moment it was such a relief -- it was so much easier.

How much do you need to see to know that it is human? Color washed over movement synthesized mottled over colors a hand's border against an arm or cloth all lit up jolly rancher red and green the light and static sour and the girls so shy against their bangs the young hair moving in the shabby glow that says alive.

Haunted/Hunted

It's obvious: the whole
world is haunted. Consider
the disasters and broken
spaces, how inside we're
all broken up, a soup
of bits like plastics
in the ocean currents. Nothing
is really solid, is really
whole. We're what coheres, what
we create. It's how
we care that matters.
No life truly disappears:
we gather and relate, mark
edges and measure holes.
We've traveled through all
this time, all these years.
We're what accumulates.
We're them. Over and over again.

New Year

The days are not the same though

they feel that way. It is how I seem:

see-through, like a gun can trace

a line, a way to see. Seam from eye

to wheel, to a thread that frays

and turns to ink. Edge of a hole

where a paw marks the edge

of our map. A chart of stars

for a fur bird to make a course

through blue, black -- all the hues

we love to lack. Our lack is a fence

the same shade as grass. As glass

finds an eye, the mass of fur we track

comes blue and soft to us, in scraps.

in a fantasy I am fully manifest as animal -- whiskers to tail --licking my paw, sniffing the air.

it's like all I ever think about is fantasy, and animals, and how gender is a ghost and we're all haunted whether we like it or not

everything opens and closes

The Seasons Cemented

THE BOOKS ARE IN!!!


The Seasons Cemented
by Amanda Ackerman

Amanda Ackerman lives in Los Angeles where she writes and teaches. She is co-editor of the press eohippus labs. She is a member of UNFO (The Unauthorized Narrative Freedom Organization) and writes as part of SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS. Her collaborative book Sin is to Celebration has been recently released from House Press. Her work has also been published or is forthcoming in in flim forum: A Sing Economy, String of Small Machines, The Physical Poets, WOMB, Moonlit, Source Material: A Journal of Appropriated Text, and Area Sneaks.

Read a poem from this collection here: http://www.wombpoetry.com/skeins/ackerman.html