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James Goodwin: 'STAR BRIGHT ICE'

Published on
Photo: James Goodwin

sense orion’s slide       shining ice


glass, metal selene. you might see me in the rhythm


in the streets       real heaven’s dark.


breath, bleed, crang, paradisal.


overtures as if cupid drops through


polished screens. wrested folded seals


wrest philharmonic that you listen and


know not to get it twisted. we’ll star


them through gazing. this yr


last borealis over


each indistinct meridian


enfleshed      but slowed down turned out


on a gurney. it isn’t cheap in


south or east, so you leave early. spider knots and


hitches on warm waterways. visitations for


blonks. tuned up leaving them


clean in two. we don’t matter about holding


what time needed/ sent us circling off-


white like virgil, it’s real life, not virtue.


limitless, empty orchestral


lines, evil gully       jars and


listens, cuts through on resurfacing crystal


verge from the heights of outdoor


plazas. it’s a plush


morn dragging ice and smoke


into subtention. each and every one of them


bars will make you scream side by side. soft


spread lyrical arsenic with the


coefficient of an ancient glacier      locked up like


shine. intimacy’s compound registers bending


true astronomical north. whether it’s


one of yr people     jump in the


ride with one of yr people’s cold


dress codes       phasing out by streetlight, bleached by


bomblight. not our usual


night walk from the deep, spliced un-


levied, mixing star bright ice       segued from


chance


James Goodwin is a poet doing a PhD in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. His pamphlet, aspects caught in the headspace we’re in: composition for friends (2020), was published by Face Press; and his book, Fleshed Out For All The Corners Of The Slip (2021), was published by the87press. His other work has appeared in publications such as Poetry Wales, the Earthbound Press poetry pamphlet series with Notes on Breath and Emanation, Granta Magazine, Ludd Gang #5 (Poet’s Hardship Fund), Senna Hoy, and Altered States (Ignota Books). Faux Ice will soon be out with Materials.