(Cloven Path)
The Adriatic Highway, a ligament that holds the tectonic states together
A transparent field of magnetic vessels swaddling a crumbling desert
nosing the star-map a clan of deer migrate West
Sultry doe-eyed creature of darkness revolving around the metallic pole as a planet around its star in heat. Fluttering dollar, adhesive aileron crammed between puffy butt cheeks
Dear you, often I find myself in the colostrum. Why are you lurking in this perverse and endless yarn, as a late-night mosquito darts through the fluorescent bath like a tank from an old war photograph?
A landscape has drown in the ethereal surface of your gazing
A midwife is palpating a deer’s uterus with divine planter’s hands
The iliac pouch is procured with the threads perspiring
(Mosaic Virus)
Pull back the hood of the marbled-pistol rose
Breathe, restful oblong creature of impermanence
The peninsula of your flesh
Secondary to the hierarchy of bone
All thought littered with metallic, south-facing jewels
Weave your body and especially your feet
Into the snake pit of reverb and nomenclature
In relief: a miniature egg, streaks of wetted charcoal, the aroma of salt
A winged placenta separates from its amniotic chrysalis
Part the labored lips as a flower’s cervix re-opening for a rain
Coordinate your mind with the muscles of latent geraniums
Half celestial, half trapezoidal
You were born in a sort of closet
The monotreme combing over
Sphincters of consciousness
Red hooves dripping
In the little space holding you: a stolen boat
Let the ghost deer kick up their white tails
A flag of surrender
Deer father, deer mother, deer you
(Umbilicus)
Stand behind the white line, behind his militant flank as the metal sharks ricochet by
you said you wanted a baby.
An urgency, a new narrative bursts open with soft little hands
easing the borders separating archetypes
lull in the tall grasses, it is a privileged dream
your hooves in threads, the earth crackles mirrors
(Don’t-Know Mind)
At a time when everyone is clearing dead deers from the way
We should move on, broadcasts born in the high ground broadcasting
The entrance to un-equipment is a post-phenomenon theory
Concealed in flowering language: move on?
Embroidered as exiled memory our deer lean against the highway
Somehow we can never hear the screams for help
For we made our way to the market of biomes and our faces weathered quickly
Our mother, dead doe, she does not need a name
Without feet antique furniture stands still as antelope
Without seeds our bodies list
Another shimmering instrument conveying myriad animalia
Upon the slanted house an orificial projection vacating mirrors
Unstable signals from the broadcast, bees commanding new swarms
Midnight earphones more modest than nothing
Like a fan of ruined petals
Dropping to the digital ground
(Photonegativity)
With what pole, hexagram hanging?
Again, you elbow the red stamp of origin
In Yugoslavia, country of haunted chordata
We are not allowed to touch the border
The umbilical cord of plague we are doomed to suffer
For the hole time it was you, exhale our forgotten country with woesome myth
At which coordinates? A dead weaver imitates a living one
Looming back into the old photographs
An unnamed woman's hair flickers all night over your shoulder
(Colony Collapse Disorder)
Another child swinging on a rickety metal playground
In the communist courtyard in Zrenjanin
Baba! Baba! she cries into the watermelon field from concrete barracks
Covering her eyes with her hooves having mistaken drooping onion bulbs for boobs
Alas, she loves you after all
Suckle the breast milk from a dead deer for six years
Speak now, with the milky onion breath of a satiated woman
How then can you talk with the one not returned?
And we enter the morning through crevices
Sonja Hristina Bjelić is a poet and apprentice midwife living between New York City and Belgrade, Serbia. She received her MFA in Poetry from New York University and is pursuing a diploma in Quantum Midwifery. Her work has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Black Box Manifold, DATABLEED, Foglifter, and others. She is a founding editor of 叵CLIP, an online journal oriented toward experimental writing and art. She teaches writing at CUNY and can be found at sonjabjelic.com.
Cole Bjelić is a writer, musician and performer based in New York City and Belgrade, Serbia. He has performed at venues in New York including The Knockdown Center, New York Academy of Art, the Center for Performance Research (CPR) and Judson Memorial Church and internationally at The Fringe Festival (Edinburgh), Brunakra (Sweden) and the San Marino Street Festival (Italy). He is a frequent collaborator with Tori Lawrence & Co. and is a member of the Commons Choir, directed by Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik. With Faïn, he is working on a book to be published as a part of her retrospective at The Chocolate Factory (NYC) in 2021. He holds a BA from the University of Iowa and an MFA from Brooklyn College (CUNY). He is a founding editor of the art/lit magazine 叵CLIP.
Jiaoyang Li is a poet and visual artist currently based in New York. Her literary work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books' China Channel, 3:AM, Datableedzine, Harana Poetry, Chinese News Magazine, Spittoon Magazine, Enclave Poetry, Voice and Verse poetry magazine, and others. Her interdisciplinary practices have been supported by the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York Live Arts Center, The Immigrants Artist Biennial, Performa Biennial, Artyard Center, Surface Gallery, and others. She serves as the co-founder of interdisciplinary poetic practice journal 叵CLIP. jiaoyangli-textile.com