Walking to the Hoover Dam in February 2020

(recalled in April 2020)

It just feels

like an age since we

walked through tunnels

to the Hoover Dam.

Well we didn’t walk to, we walked towards –

turning back before the actual dam. I

felt scared of it myself, just one small word

with all that water banked up behind. 

We liked the hillsides

with their rocks and splashes of clean light.

The mountains were pink and dun and violet.

Lake Mead – old sand-maps tattering on its surface –

diverting water into Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California.

It all seems built so long ago, as though the dam and

reservoir were made, like land, at some beginning

time. Before America. But really

in the Great Depression. 

What will we build now?

Or take down 

–      dismantle

Or be holding, holding

holding

Georgi Gill responds to JL Williams

Day 29

My work is with the living,

sick but alive.

We’ve been suspended 

for months? A year?

We’re too sick to say.

Instead, I work

with the dead.

A side project

that used to be

more fun.

Day 31

I can’t read poetry now,

even beautiful words

spun into taut lines

by friends.

bee  crocus     Colorado

The words weigh heavy,

gravel in my mouth.

I’m sorry. 

I just can’t make sense

of beauty or of sense

itself.

Day 34

I keep sounding

out words

but all my books

are about death.

Why didn’t I notice before?

Foucault opens up a few corpses

but all that feels

 – forgive me –

too close to the bone.

I turn to Patricia Highsmith’s

murder victims for light relief.

Alice Tarbuck responds to JL Williams

Bring me armfuls of roses and tell me the right decision

I am trying to do what is right and I am trying not to let

my body ruin itself against the rocks of everything bad,

of loneliness. It isn’t the right shape, my feet say, my socks

say no to shoes. I want to touch my face to every object

that ever existed, dirt on the high cheekbones, dirt

on the lips. I want to thank all the babies who will not know

what any of this felt like, this felted, green-baized inflict

of quietness, when i am at the crest of seeking noise.

Rachel McCrum responds to Tessa Berring (writing 6 May 2020, recalling 12 & 13 March 2020)

Now I’ve forgotten

what it is to want to want

to stagger home punchdrunk

quivering and greedy

because we can

On the last night – when we half-knew what was coming –

we went to eat Ethiopian food at the Queen Sheba

feeling unsure of ourselves but wanting it

illicit ill-advised the last thing the last we promised

wanting to push our fingers into our mouths

the bitter cool sponge of injera curled in our palms

the deep red of berbere lamb stuck in under our nails

till we rolled back home guilty, excited, sated,

to close the doors behind us

and the night before even that had danced

in an empty coral ballroom

like it was the end of the world

and I couldn’t half-stop

myself from half-kissing everyone

half-peacocking my half-naked

breasts out at the half-world

half-mad with joy and tension and vodka

because we could we had to

these unsure measures

this one foot in and one foot out still

shake it shake it shake it

and then there were no more last things

then there was no more anything

and we shut our mouths and tried to forget

tried not to half-dream of full desire