Abstract #1204 by Ellen June Wright
Her movement clicks
I am typing in the office / spare
bedroom. in the next room my wife
is preparing for bed.
she wanders like a bluebottle
through our apartment, gathering
water glasses, switching off
occasional lights. I don’t know
why she does this; I’ll do it
again later. through the door
her movement clicks
like a man with a plate
of fresh mussels.
Getting Married
she calls from KL
in a foul rotten mood. she’s sick
she says violently, of all of this
wedding and stuff. wants to come back;
to stop talking with family
about all our plans to get married.
wants to just do it, or not do it
now. and I want to do it, and I tell her
again that we’re going to. the trouble
with weddings it seems – my friend
told me – is that everyone has
an opinion. it’;s a thing you do
once, and then hopefully never
again. I just want to lock it
that we’re spending our lives like this.
just wanted to ask her
to marry me – to have her say yes and have
that be an end of it – as a clam
makes a pearl out of filth.
The sociable motion of chaos
there is something: these movements
of people like flowers in wind –
in the patient clock-measure
of petals coming open
and closed. people move – people travel
abroad and away from you.
or sometimes you do it, or other
things sometimes occur.
mornings flower open
like fingers from palms,
and close again later, as a hand
closes over a steering wheel. or like birds together
on days calm in flight, cloudless
ahead of a storm – flocks
exploding, a sociable motion
of chaos come up from the rooftops.
sometimes you don’t see people. fallon’s
in amsterdam, doing his masters.
goggin’s in galway, and jack has a lot going on
with the new house and architecture
and the sister’s new baby.
I spend evenings reading,
drinking wine, writing poems.
I romanticise loneliness
in the laziest ways –
I compare it with flowers and birds.
type it out in such limply-boned
words in a stack
as would shame me
if anyone saw it, and especially
one of my friends. no man me
to write this, as if it were
the 1950s. as if I couldn’t call
if I wanted to call them – no flower.
no bird or no man.
About the author:
Ellen June Wright’s work revolves around the power of color and the emotions and memories they evoke. She is inspired by the works of Stanley Whitney, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Frank Bowling, Howardena Pindell, Jamaican Artist Cecil Cooper and others. Her art appears in LETTERS, Gulf Stream Magazine, Wild Roof Journal, Breakwater Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Hole In The Head Review, Oyster River Pages, Kitchen Table Quarterly, NOVUS Literary Journal and others. Her work was included in the 2024 Newark Arts Festival and featured at the HACPAC in NJ.
To see more visit: 8-ellen-wright.pixels.com
In the artist’s words:
DS Maolalai has been described by one editor as “a cosmopolitan poet” and another as “prolific, bordering on incontinent”. His work has been nominated fourteen times for BOTN, eleven for the Pushcart and once for the Forward Prize, and released in three collections; “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden” (Encircle Press, 2016), “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” (Turas Press, 2019) and “Noble Rot” (Turas Press, 2022)