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
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.
/// 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. /// “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. |