Kathleen Reichelt & Randee Silv


Responding to Farnessity

your voice is a jacket
the kind that knows it can withstand the wind
cool, but not distant
zipping and unzipping into beats
direct, strong, all images equal
sentiments
violence
facts
lists
images
poetic mixed with conversational
observations of real or imagined
things we all do
a bushel of oranges

He had it all figured out except where did nothing come from. The last was inverted to the first. Invisible. She knew they were. Complete, yet not finished. Oranges. A bushel of oranges rolled towards, faster, then stopped.

I heard your words before I saw them
swinging legs one foot per concrete slab
hands in pockets huff huff keep up
chic cheeky leaking first person into thirds
wide flat concrete word slabs
you walk every day

Territories: Planned measured delivered. Bending shifting shocking. Attending blanking scrubbed. You could feel the crispness of consuming and the distraction of error.

farnessity
reminds me of a city stop light one summer my foot on the brake when two hipsters
dressed in ponchos collapsed on the hood of my car drunk spectacular choreographed embrace his eyes met my front row gaze before they
sliding spectacle slipped back onto the road my light turned green they reached the sidewalk why was I shaking

I grabbed onto a red splash traveling fast across the sea. If it wasn’t for the walls I’d be falling into a ditch.

was it before that or later
I read her biography on the airplane
flying to the land of the mesa
ghost ranch burnt blood cracking dry
night sky where the ladder reached

Prolonged chants ferment in rusty bowls weighing somewhat less than the moon. No wind. Swamp. No boat. Canyon. Shredded crimes and battered longings nailed shut.

I would learn later
unlike lakes of summer
deserts ask questions
we want to know
we give examples

How do you not fold into hate? Shovel it. Shovel it.

regarding the jacket
windbreaker no hood
neck and cuffs stripped
inner city basketball 1970s
green on a hanger in my closet
I found it at the thrift shop
too big for me but too cool not to bring home
I wear it the way I hold photographs
by the edges

Disturbances = Impair. Unusable = Inventiveness. Changing change. Traffic jams. Towards. Against. And away from.

light against a building slides down into pavement
where concrete meets concrete
something behind me frames it
into a yellow open book
we are reading colour
spelled with extra letters

She showed us how to turn downside inside and outside upside down. Rosewood stalks beat against no-stop delving. It doesn’t take long for daylight to reach the unwelcoming curb.

the story after the story of memory
the storage of memory
casting the story
out cast
casting out
who is directing?

Farness dripped steadily into remoteness. If you want, you can exchange places and look at what they see. Time brought storms. Storms brought quivers. They did make it across. Everything strokes a memory. Everything recalls a sensation.

Kathleen Reichelt is a writer, performer and visual artist who regularly contributes to the NYC art journal Arteidolia, and has been included in two editions of the Dada periodical Maintenant, by Three Rooms Press in Brooklyn. The artist is co-founder of 253469, and is currently based in the 1000 Islands, Canada, where she runs an artist residence, film and stage studio. Reichelt's poems and plays have been staged and translated into audio recordings, installations and film.

Abstract painter Randee Silv writes likes she paints. Farnessity, a chapbook of wordslabs has been published by dancing girl press (2018), and slabs have also appeared in Posit, Urban Graffiti, Maudlin House, Sensitive Skin & Bone Bouquet. She’s editor of swifts & slows: A Quarterly of Crisscrossings and Arteidolia, a platform for the writing of artists, poets, and musicians to re-approach, re-consider visual, sound, word.

 
 
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