by Simone Roberts

                             it’s the migrations

               you mean here?
                                                                    your determinism is amusing

the horse latitudes                       those swift isobars                       that not-being-there that is

                              here?                              well, mostly

                it’s really between, the migration, it’s the being between

connected

connection

                                                                                                                   (dis)

                              so much depends on the trade winds

                                                                          on the place of your life in those winds

                              relative, of course, to the value-of

and of what it would take to break you                               in the swiftness

                              how to connect, or disconnect you from here

from the notion of here and of that meaning some-one-thing

                                                                      because you have not been listening to the century

opening

gesture

attempt

                              (no do-overs)

                                                          Such an amusing determinism, that what was is what can
                                         be, that we are not moved into by the future, as if its not waiting to
                                                        be
                                                                     written with new quandaries                 

                         migrations, how many will migrate out?

Of here?                                       again, you and your determinism

Then where?         Really.                              Really?

 

[M. F. Simone Roberts is the Poetry & Social Justice Fellow for Split This Rock where she co-curates Poem of the Week and is managing editor for The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database. As an independent scholar of poetics and feminist phenomenology, Roberts is co-editor of the anthology Iris Murdoch and the Moral Imagination: Essays and author of the monograph A Poetics of Being-Two: Irigaray’s Ethics and Post-Symbolist Poetics.]

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