KIRSTEN IHNS / 4 POEMS — always crashing

TECHNOLOGY

i and love and you chicken, for cats
when i have a question

a subject not about its origins
like, recover from the fall: pure discipline
/the myth
low pressure music box area
building toward storm
an event like a law, hot
hot in the soup container
and surrounds it—

i was surviving all around that description
take the act out and shake it, it is the
rug,

baby dander blower:

vacuum filter cleaner

vacuum cleaner filter

filter cleaner vacuum

cleaner filter vacuum

once we did it…

so we cleaned up the floor
so the we felt new

when i have a question

WHAT CAN YOU DO W A MAGMA

-so attractive
-likes to form crystals
-sass
-body lay in darkness producing its symptoms
-in every error just hunting ways out
-then the one way
-stay in the error til then
-slowly the question would vary its function
-still looking

so we stay there—

in the
empirical multi channel
parking

bass tub
guard frequency
til they tell us
get off

someone speaking through the rocketing
cumulus
needs something

i can
hear them:
gasket doom noise
everything builds with what’s
readiest at hand

/pressure

the silk had its numbers
i had my impulse
ruben had his lightstick, to see in the dark

and we were all in the airplane
breathing on vapors

vapors, vapors

RADIANT STICK

the bird did not wish to wear its little suit
the sun was exercising on the air
at this time, that power of sun called “likeness”

the apple sat quietly in another picture, being not there

my task was to organize these signs

the first system of writing was seeing
at all
and the second
you appeared to me under various dimensional signs & ghosts
under the velvet
various spiritual similarity adorned its walls
and i felt in my soul, for you, picture
i felt my soul as a tilting inclining including picture
your image was more like radiation
then sock
then i could not shake it
there you have it
seduced when i offered her value to her
on new terms in whose veins was her blood, said the radiator

i could be directed to look out the windows
its purpose was outside my witness so i was yours so i was
/saw a flat field
all gray
my eyelids
it was the bank?
a great steel door—

the picture looked in its heart and found a word
picture
it said an angel
flower bush burning burrow sunset
clock face ill ness hour dial dolphin
subsumption
what is lifted up and included
or coldness

then i was afraid that i was a sign—

YES, RAIN

the truth disappeared before facts could
correspond to it
when it
felt the shape of the wood material
it went right out
& then was darkness…

i felt i was a sort of equipment
a pervaded equipment
rain-laid dampness on leather

/a thing like that

i distributed god then through the portico, into the stone valley, among the
sparkle
televised noise of cheering women on stairs
rising up stairs
the nature of small objects falls down them

in art was a sun dawn place
supposed to stay crisp
supposed to stay
tingly

i could not recall what it “was”
just the way to it
thru letterforms
the trailing vines, remembered sex, photo, glitter
the cannibal impulse i wrap in a tent &
myself in the safety of “interests”

we went into the night like that, flammably voting

calmly i sing “lifting” into yogurt from the Spoon
making possible
breakfast

my wish opens doors on the chute
still it is breakfast, not very
perturbed:

thought it was a snake, but it was a snake
i like to look up, even when i can’t read the words

when the water came over us

LAW PLAY

staring at it at

IT AT

/the recording device

they will say nothing to each other

in the salmon beam

which had that fine look of a medical plastic

are you nice, with a zipper pouch

                            look at the sky now, fog made it
     a uniform sauce
     an animal that looks like a stain
                                    it moves up the wall
                       it is
                                undiminished—

the only thing i can return you, love, is a verdict
—verdict—

designed to do something to a person

any

who enter it—

this is the option of my life

& i sweat it

in the fast station

whatever can be removed from the landscaping

from the gas island

Kirsten Ihns is the author of sundaey (Propeller Books, 2020). She is currently a PhD candidate and Neubauer Presidential Fellow in English at the University of Chicago, where she studies attentional rhythms in long-form contemporary poetry and film, makes short video works with the artist Brett Swenson, and cocurates the cclouds reading/artist talk series. Individual poems appear or are forthcoming in Hyperallergic, The Canary, jubilat, Bennington Review, TAGVVERK, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She is from Atlanta, GA, and Pensacola, FL.