Hannah Brooks-Motl

Well-Lit Sexual Encounter

 

 

His first appearance as huffing groans

 

I hear too much of her

 

In the garish curtains and glass tremendous

 

Imagine she looked through them toward it

 

Wanting or liking to want, stacking debts into the gray ziggurat

 

An hour accrues sympathetically

 

A garland of lilies stitched into fabric, they have touched

 

The Perspex here and here as talk stretches further

 

The motel makes an easy invention

 

Carpet grows meaningful, taking apart the song

 

For the sadness of pleasure, orange plush

 

A lot of golds in this music, spreading reddish

 

Orange, orange, and umber

 

She rolls down the mix of fabrics, such as plush

 

Orange plush, then flannel

 

In this room sound swarms unparticular and correct

 

Through the bust of screen window

 

The bed is a taste so correct in its serenade

 

The wallpaper of earliest morning

 

Awake in the death of one Sunday’s lyric

 

Awake with the scenery I rejoice for the day the color of field

 

That’s such a good line, said to one another

 

The pang of a few rocks outside the door kicked in

 

The well-litness of the lonely

 

Their silkish horizons and regular orbit

 

In the cranberry color of car light and dawning

 

Moods of an up-down arrangement

 

Or going for groceries he grabs ass in the clearing

 

I am grooving rose notes in this country

 

Music the invisible harness, position

 

Imagine the highways had been made of love, all the highways

 

And intimate townscapes

 

The brave edges of sex finally uncreepy

 

Conveyed merely the moment reviving

 

And merely I listened, poured myself through assumption

 

Posted the threnody in fair use

 

Watched as time it was that time widened

Goya Yoga

 

 

I found the moment in my car

next I lost it. “For the car is pierced by evil.”

In a circle of patrons, on whom might I inflict

such bright and minor status?

The everyday guarantees a certain visual diplomacy,

the river and white field above which

thorough cloudscapes hover.

I find myself outside their nuance.

There is a parallel shine to one’s conscience.

It spins its vinyl emotion.

I put the cello on the spectrum, I put my brother.

Someone worked full-time in our error.

The all-night gym is a particular fear, perhaps

the meadow.

 

*

 

Just for reference on May the 28th

some meteors came. Looking is like hoarding

and thus hoarding. I try to move

beyond it, elongate the star sign

into a random object: crying baby.

Thing of the chest. And then

the salmon, agog.

 

 

Much insight is nonrecurring though

I would like to forage its source,

sever the crude future

of each weather. What’s a fellow

if not in theory. His numerical ragers

to find yourself on the rooftop of, like wind

the mixer.

 

 

Where all one’s fog lives

might then be this softer institution, a kind of people

and rawly uncreative, plus repetition:

I am attached to this bracelet.

I am attached to my carriage.

I am attached to such nectar.

 

*

 

Satisfaction is a plain destination.

Yet disorder maintains

my reluctance to flatter.

The corn maze presents its doubled nature,

weak incidence of ataraxia, and

the watcher leaning in. I was a mild woman

who never took a salaried position.

biography

HANNAH BROOKS-MOTL is the author of the chapbook The Montaigne Result (Song Cave, 2013) and the full-length collection The New Years (Rescue Press, 2014). Recent work has appeared in Banango Street, BAX 2014, and the Cambridge Literary Review. She currently lives in Chicago.