KALEIDOSCOPED
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desire lines

JAYDN DEWALD


is absence       he enters
     not stagelight       she roams
not solos       he searches / note-
     perfect is stone       she circles
the alto       she listens
     is born      not solos / warm-
blooded       he shudders
     not shadowed       she swivels
is fern-soft       he cowers
     is bone       here-
after not shadowed       is absence
     she sings       now stairwells
not stagelights       his eyes close
     the strings       she in-
hales the alto / is       green smoke
     he turns       not sequins
he shudders       not fretboards
     she burns       then silence
he searches       is snaking
     the strings       is green smoke / she
towers       note-
     perfect       he dreams 
here-       after she slow-fades
     he panics       is stone
is silence       not fern-soft
     now stairwells       she circles
is snaking       his fretboard / warm-
      blooded       is born

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JAYDN DEWALD (he/they) is the author of The Rosebud Variations and Sheets of Sound, both from Broken Sleep Books. They serve as managing editor of COMP: an interdisciplinary journal and are Assistant Professor of English & Director of Creative Writing at Piedmont University.

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What does it mean to be kaleidoscoped? My forthcoming chapbook, THEN DARKNESS (Broken Sleep Books, 2024), is indebted to the kaleidoscope: It’s chockfull of poems whose patterns of words and images continually reflect and refract, continually strive to both exhaust and renew the language.

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“Desire Lines (3)” is kaleidoscopic in its repetitions and rhymes. What separates the poem from mere exercise, however, is its attempt to fuse absence and presence, to superimpose the visible on the invisible (or vice versa). Because phrases, when repeated, are recontextualized, I aimed to create a ghostly palimpsest of images and potential meanings—a poem that must repossess or haunt itself as it is being written/read.  ​ 

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  • ISSUE 3.1
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