essa may ranapiri
ON FORGETTING
what is it to throw out a memory • to gas a whole climate of thoughts • and untether them • to shove those pains into a chunk of wood • or mix them with ink saliva and acrylics • to make pains out of this rejection of pain • in the form of backwards facing razor blades • to cut up instead of down • the skin will not forgive you • and make shredded lettuce sores on the façade of your rotten balance • your equilibrium of mass is a picture where the weight • where the focus is drawn to one side • but the colour is elsewhere • a pallet a pale outlet of oneness • one mess grafted from a patchwork of patchworks • unthreading the hook pulls up loops that your brain runs on like tracks •
G-d saved a corpse born too soon.
               there is a capa city &alimit in the iron bird you got
               seated under in ur spotted internal
               or gan
               ice to retard the movement outwards
9months complete in the brittle lung
               your blossom didn’t need it freckled by three months turn
spellbound Augustus glut crunch
littered October into the Strait
Sept-embered memory- oh phoenixed gasket crashing
hospital dripbuzz in the high-end u laugh at the drugthere aretheatrics
                                                                           trapeze
appendicide !// the wrist can move in multiple directions can-wound inside the
mortal-staggerprimor/dial black like walls closing in and sensationbruise good
u motherfucker bruise re-use the bones for curry powder pollen:
eight hundred grams of
               good-virgin fleshquiet quiet quit___
the mother of the child will write a poem about it and hold it next to the body to scope out the tie
a red one about the neck
the skin is softcarapace up and downu mustn’t touch it yet you mustn’t touch
patter null mx zero mx
                                             stick the flat version of the thing to the wall of survivors
the child has no voice
               scart
               merg
               ghurn-
               a sepresiable language
                              a capsule of liquid is the dose of you is the municipal mammal tooled for artifice
it might as well have died was the logic in a cube:
                              Infants neutral body
                              temperature range heat
                              production normal
                              birthweight post natal
                              age the infant
                              naked oxygen consumption
                              glucose use
                              persistent hypothermia stores,
                              metabolic acidosis
                              hypoglycaemia
                              surfactant production
                              caloric requirements
                              chronic, weight gain.
                              convection radiat.
                              Nursing care critical,
                              thermoregulation ongoing,
                              assess environmental interventions
                                                                                                         /the little shit is dying
APATHETIC
She went opshopping without me.
So I gave her a price, battered her unloved for a music box. Couldn’t even play in tune, didn’t jerk me off a lullaby. Useless.
Cracked open her heart and tossed it with all the nostalgems. I never cared for her cleft melody. A joker with a thief of tone all spittle no substance. Couldn’t stand it. But sometimes I just wanna lie down     her stroking hands through my hair. Remove them for myself.
Make a metaphor out of it. All rusty and tired. On the tissue boxes I’ve wasted in you. A chime in my crystalline body. That rings hollow and I listen and let it settle into my stomach.
I’m so tired from holding myself up. But I deserve greatness.
And she was the perfect support as fractured as I liked it.
essa may ranapiri (takatāpui; they/them/theirs) is a poet from Kirikiriroa, Aotearoa / they have words in Mayhem, Poetry NZ, Brief, Starling, THEM and POETRY Magazine / they will write until they're dead
previous page     contents     next page
ON FORGETTING
what is it to throw out a memory • to gas a whole climate of thoughts • and untether them • to shove those pains into a chunk of wood • or mix them with ink saliva and acrylics • to make pains out of this rejection of pain • in the form of backwards facing razor blades • to cut up instead of down • the skin will not forgive you • and make shredded lettuce sores on the façade of your rotten balance • your equilibrium of mass is a picture where the weight • where the focus is drawn to one side • but the colour is elsewhere • a pallet a pale outlet of oneness • one mess grafted from a patchwork of patchworks • unthreading the hook pulls up loops that your brain runs on like tracks •
               there is a capa city &alimit in the iron bird you got
               seated under in ur spotted internal
               or gan
               ice to retard the movement outwards
9months complete in the brittle lung
               your blossom didn’t need it freckled by three months turn
spellbound Augustus glut crunch
littered October into the Strait
Sept-embered memory- oh phoenixed gasket crashing
hospital dripbuzz in the high-end u laugh at the drugthere aretheatrics
                                                                           trapeze
appendicide !// the wrist can move in multiple directions can-wound inside the
mortal-staggerprimor/dial black like walls closing in and sensationbruise good
u motherfucker bruise re-use the bones for curry powder pollen:
eight hundred grams of
               good-virgin fleshquiet quiet quit___
the mother of the child will write a poem about it and hold it next to the body to scope out the tie
a red one about the neck
the skin is softcarapace up and downu mustn’t touch it yet you mustn’t touch
patter null mx zero mx
                                             stick the flat version of the thing to the wall of survivors
the child has no voice
               scart
               merg
               ghurn-
               a sepresiable language
                              a capsule of liquid is the dose of you is the municipal mammal tooled for artifice
it might as well have died was the logic in a cube:
                              Infants neutral body
                              temperature range heat
                              production normal
                              birthweight post natal
                              age the infant
                              naked oxygen consumption
                              glucose use
                              persistent hypothermia stores,
                              metabolic acidosis
                              hypoglycaemia
                              surfactant production
                              caloric requirements
                              chronic, weight gain.
                              convection radiat.
                              Nursing care critical,
                              thermoregulation ongoing,
                              assess environmental interventions
                                                                                                         /the little shit is dying
APATHETIC
She went opshopping without me.
So I gave her a price, battered her unloved for a music box. Couldn’t even play in tune, didn’t jerk me off a lullaby. Useless.
Cracked open her heart and tossed it with all the nostalgems. I never cared for her cleft melody. A joker with a thief of tone all spittle no substance. Couldn’t stand it. But sometimes I just wanna lie down     her stroking hands through my hair. Remove them for myself.
Make a metaphor out of it. All rusty and tired. On the tissue boxes I’ve wasted in you. A chime in my crystalline body. That rings hollow and I listen and let it settle into my stomach.
I’m so tired from holding myself up. But I deserve greatness.
And she was the perfect support as fractured as I liked it.
essa may ranapiri (takatāpui; they/them/theirs) is a poet from Kirikiriroa, Aotearoa / they have words in Mayhem, Poetry NZ, Brief, Starling, THEM and POETRY Magazine / they will write until they're dead