Poems and Texts

“Janey’s Invocation” by Rachel Zolf

Janey’s Invocation

Infallible settlers say this is the latest season
they have known. All seed life seems somnolent,
yet a delicate suggestion of colour is at the tips
of the willows. An insidious, slow-moving process
is at work in the trees – one that spells from death
-car to drive more slowly unto drouth-world. The wine
of spring aflush on the face THE COPS- FIND- 2 J3<3
I H • ^ \ Hn is a Goad of Death Gourd of chanqts Takt
Life is totally totally lonely of Nature. Dearth is
the only reality we’ve got left in our nicey-nicey-
clean-ice-cream-t v scraps, so we’d better worship
the long wall of skulls next to the ball park. The delay
only whets our monstrosity. A unique beauty about
this pre-vernal landscape before it is screened
by red-brown colour, air and surface, semi-thick –
a boldness suggestive of how Janey and the rest
of the people witnessed the Italian primitifs
in ‘wild’ societies where the word ‘why’
can’t exist. With a minimum of means we
get a maximum of expression.

Rachel Zolf

Rachel Zolf is a cross-border transplant from Toronto to Philadelphia whose writing and other artwork tends to queerly enact how ethics founders on the shoals of the political. Her five books of poetry include Janey’s Arcadia, Neighbour Procedure and Human Resources, all from Coach House Books, and a Selected Poetry is forthcoming. Films Zolf has written and/or directed have shown internationally at such venues as White Cube Bermondsey, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Her work has won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and been a finalist for two Lambda Literary Awards, among other honors. She is nearing completion of a theoretical text called A Language No One Speaks: The Dangerous Perhaps of Monstrous Witness.

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