Poems by Astrid Lorange

ONE IS ALSO CHIPS
 
I am the line itself, a small, esp. thin piece
in hewing or cutting; the course of a wood-
 
man’s work. I am a woodman’s Chyppe. He
broke dates, sodden then dry, for a blaze: on
 
the ground the parsley’s a sapling, the tile of
a battle of turpentine. I love you. I love you
 
as I am embedded in the doughy earlobe next
to your brain. Poets and their German Work-
 
shops, their fracture of a potato as scorched in
molten fats. Orange wedges, a salt cellar, the
 
tug of Dickens at the back of the throat. I’m so
thirst. And I am just like my mother, betrayed
 
by cunning sauces, a piece of money, a willing
to pile. Straddling a driver, straddling one who
 
plays that damn insurance game. One wish is to
close your circuit, to route all nervous systems

 
and tech-gear through my palm, as though sopped
into bread. Inside every cell is a system beyond your
 
own capacity for mathematics. Inside every wire
is a bloodline beyond our sense of community.
 
You, whom thy fingers walke. I walked into the
space inside your downy cat’s ear, folded as an
 
envelope between my fingerpads, threaded as
hats into baskets. One thing filleted from another
 
to add strength, threading as mutton or dung of
buffalo, skin of gravy, a potato, a grammatical device.
 
I know a chip or two: I stand on my leg like a heron,
sole into knee-crook, fist into waist, toastcrust, yes,
 
as a sword, demanding the right to conduct this
breakfast as it ought to be, a quarrel for a dial. What?
 
We nivver had these chips when we be wed.
Love is a baker’s dozen, strokes of an axe. Strokes.

 
Thus removing small parts, small parts at a time:
With, of, from, bred, stepet, etc. You make it all as
 
an egg-shell or leaf-curl, nursling of some ten-acre
graincrop. I threw in my pocketknife for this stake,
 
I slipped it into the net, smooth as cruelty, as you lay
back, chippin oot with a nod. Smooth and cold like a
 
cuke thrown laterally, Mr Chips done lost his chips.
Silicon nitride! I fit right into this archipelago, so do
 
you. Electronics as in a Greek tragedy, fed through
cassette narratives of sex, transformation, war and
 
deep economy. Sublimated as warm yeast’d ale up
through the chipboard of a bedframe, becoming the
 
rain of two neural systems and two sets of thighs. He
always had a chip on his shoulder re: psychoanalysis.
 
Why? Because it whips one into an auto-meringue,
all air as time all self-concern, all ultimate tender-

 
ness and vulnerability, immune to contamination.
But seedy trilogy would say all manner to the


contrary, a lesson in affect, at the very least.
Animated as a whiff, tracked like a domestic rabbit,
 
he is hugging a python until it dies, then arranging
a funeral service for it, or stripping off his undies at
 
a sunset-themed dragshow

PHOTOGRAPH

the one who wants his photographic
portrait taken as a hero, as a rose’s
lip, as the powdery stamen or heir
loom. the fabrics through which your
photons pass, like fingers. your ether
salts and photons all your photons
at their upper limit speed are fingers,
the photocopy are finger
 
you photograph full-length naked scalar,
the grain of your skin shoving around two
giant faces and an electronic lilac. traits
miniaturised, lacking a zone and a bird’s view
(tissue, cell, a fish thudded to death on a boat’s haunch)
the photo for example, showing Kafka as a shabby
industrial township

formate of the printed poem: fat inner
thighs, alert, saving a finger. the
photo on a brief introduction to drop
in technologies. raked-light photographs,
a hundred hours a dozen or so bytes.
teutonic words snug around my knuckle
a passage way the front wheels jammed a
small slip the bit the pattern where you
split into five or more hookworms.
 
you, as a library paper machine or pocket-
book. as serious as I am I want your photograph
as a dust of contact. here lies the dimension of sense,
the exactitude of a sea lion. the answer? exactly!
exactly as you are, filling a photograph with your head,
obscure as a prime number.
 
my mouth extended to yours, as later remarks suggest. my
mouth at exactly the same time coming into
your mouth as a photograph makes us stretch
together in identification.

photons moving into a new caricature, this
time of science. two photographs of roughly
the same scale revealing you as a plate,
leaking gas, you as an enzyme, leaking yourself.
you as an animist so conic and singular.
 
this is a photograph of rats, a photograph of cotton
and a family of rats arranged around a cotton
field. substituting language with photons that
are fingers fingers through the plane stratic
fingers fingers finding a certain faciality and
pining for a new motto, correct and perceived,
vegetal, sexed, a plateau stretched and hided.
 
this photograph finds a bedroom lost to seeds
thrown and cracked by a rocket. if it were a
sentence, if it were an interior — casts or fossils,
the palette of desert between dead rabbits —
it would be two lines, a sentence made from two
lines, as an x-ray of a forearm. a series of
colour photographs, some as big as the wall
that mounts them, all photographs of transfer.

photo as bombardment, as a neighbourhood
for process, as spots blacker yet, a kind of
strong pathology. Tokyo, the photograph.
Tokyo, the luminous cubes. Tokyo, a woman,
from a photograph in 1992 showing a kabuki theatre.
 
crushing everything in its path, this photograph
is a concrete machine, a disaster, lit by parallel neon bars
lit by electronic music and a dense but misleading
spectacle above your head

F  U  L  L    M  O  U  T  H    Y  E  L  L  O  W
 
as a cooking as a little flyers slightly stabbing
if we do not other hand an amount of daintiest
 
 
 
will you hold my stupid roosters hold my two
inches of learning club with full mouth yellow
 
 
 
bananas red apples in a celebration daily living
eat fibre room handicaps, speaking Chinese and
 
 
 
getting around in six to seven playing at angles
how I strive for literally infects many girlfriend
 
 
 
deeper bread or rolls, first hand doctor lunch-
wrap and tea, dawn on French superior face time
 
 
 
summer tooth and immunity for cherry I love to
hear it speaking take the top of his head and parrot
 
 
 
any below might’ve died at her window at night
catch and a hard apple add oil, spoon hand-feeding
 
 
 
plexi scene and we eat in there soaking clowns
credited getting around, walking, a cool glass with
 
 
 
virus customers handle a west strip happening dear
not connected to her public occasional two hours
 
 
 
shortcut to thyroid, mouth, hands, feet, little mouth
bad kissed it why did speaking Hungarian man content
 
 
 
official telling battle or vague tree trunks skilled
mediocrity Smith’s lap control incense and flax
 
 
 
eating lamp eating table dish fingers stood rose
visibly tongued hanging password hand-rolled, I
 
 
 
decide on a slaw and moment just puffs appearance
about making walls core-cubed and heart-breaking
 
 
at the table, dreamy voice’s vital airman’s ladder
boots win by a fancy fingers and invent thank hit
 
 
arms between homemade butter and disagrees this
year dangling non-phone intensity mugs, speaking of
 
 
 
systems of breadth and jar upper level non-cell
speaking tremors in the backroom tried his eating
 
 
 
full of walnut or blood thinner what I could die
from normal hand his or her robe or conversation
 
 
 
and her, in my room, dissolved salt, but I/we will
tax base and away jobs cow like go dry, bottle, on
 
finally three women still a brother almost-ripe and
finally cooled down through years in the citizenry
 
 
 
back to her mother’s argy appetite stimulus narrowing
forget about agriculture doing is perishable and non-
 
 
 
perishables, speaking as they dropping open eat with
the teen ordering trains excessive six colour enjoy
 
 
 
dipped wooden perfectly with fake heartache raw
grafting blender cameos massive local’s three time
 
 
 
pet creamy body needs stretched speaking monk
body needs and fatter enumerated sold a see you

“One is also Chips” and “Photograph” are from Eating and Speaking, Tea Party Republicans Press, 2011. “Full Mouth Yellow” was first published by sydneypoetry.com (Adrian Wiggins and Siobhan Toohill) for the May 2011 Final Friday reading series.