FOREVER MACHINE
Julia Wohlstetter
A book is always night
We recite, love to look, I love to look, everybody loves to look
Sometimes we walk in museums, those perhaps of memory
Arthur says, this will be bad for you
Madame Daphné adjusts her red sweat suit
As a small pawn falls slowly off the table
Spring stages pleasuramas on the banks of the Seine
Clara asks que dit la silence?
We eat some more folkloric yogurt
I stare at space until it arranges letters
A stranger says, you are very young to be here
I write The Croissant Also Rises
A chair is always a woman
A story about the darker matters, what lies at the center of the earth
An old movie plays on the jetty at Orly
You point to a ring inside the tree and say, this is where we are
The clock strikes three times
I write a memoir called Famous Last Words
Mon tailleur est riche
We drive home in a blizzard
Clear of the moonlight in Vermont
Strangers crowd around my bed at night and stare
I start the same story and I play all the characters
Rose lets me brush her hair, just once
A dream divides my body
We kill time with chocolate behind the Pompidou
Men empower clocks
Men give me names like Legs, Bitch, and Chérie
I was promised transformation, instead given order
I say I’m fine I’m fine I’m fine I’m fine
Parataxis attacks us
In the doric slumber of winter
Memory repeats signs so that I exist
I write mouth-trellis and shipsunkwrist
I guard the necklace of your names
Feminine, Marvelous and Tough
A woman is a progressive shipwreck
An interruption of becoming
There are only two types of stories:
A stranger sets out on a journey
A stranger comes to town
Don’t be a bitch, he says, so I am
We meet in the old hours, you call me your ghost
I say fabulous things like nylon, glass, and plastic
I run around naked with a bag on my head
A woman is a city
Inside an algae of shadows
Zoe says maybe someday you’ll decide to be angry
My heart’s aflutter!
I come home to find many new rooms in my house
The clock strikes twenty-seven times
Asa says love is a condiment
Arthur says Isn’t this what you wanted?
Sadness puts on its’ puritan hat
Another pothole hotline makes me laugh
Watching my friends use tinder
I imagine breaking everything inside the store
My hands make simple work
Eros holds a mirror to a young woman as a horse plays the lyre
I turn on my hag fire
A woman is always a fork
But somedays I am my gloves
Somedays the coffee doesn’t taste right and I make it again, and again
There is one man who still lives inside my sleeve
He says This Will Be Bad For You
La forme d’une fille change plus vite, helas, que la coeur d’un ville
A pen is always a man
A spire of lonesome, a trust iceberg, a risk log
I find you crying in front of a horse
The door opens onto endless series of doors:
A threat of Aunts
A confusion of Havanese
I want to be the girl with the most cake
My collection of limbs scattered
Through his gaze & his gaze
In patternless patter of anxiety
I write please and repeat, please repeat
My boot clicks, and then another, and another and another
Another man says chaton, I laugh bottles
The tourist asks if he can take a picture of my tattoo
I say, someone is thinking of you
I write sibilant, incarnadine and porous forest
What is beauty without a chorus?
Moonlight comma disaster
A kiss cannot be enough snow
I sit in the garden and blink five years
Fog is too easy, perfect shape for a ghost
I write moral compass then replace it with calm ass moss
None of the buildings on Belmont are lonely
How come the dead rule us?
Julia Wohlstetter is a poet living in Portland, Oregon. Author of the chapbook “Please and Please,” her work has appeared in Reality Beach, 1001 Journal, Bodega Magazine, Metatron-Omega and The Chapess Zine. She holds a BA in French and Photography from Bennington College.
