INFLORESCENCE
by Ricky Novaes de Oliveira
I offer you an effort of warmth as it gets colder.
“Inflorescence” is an experimental autumn love poem. There actually (supposedly) is an arsonist in my building according to emails and gossip. I wonder what they are trying to burn. Some of the other stuff in the poem may be true, too. If my apartment doesn’t burn down maybe I’ll tell you more sometime.
There’s space for thinking through this poem, literally and figuratively. I’m toying with form and space—I had several em dashes like the one in this sentence at first, but I replaced them all with blank space. So it’s more like a pause or a flash than a straight connection. The columns were at first an effect to organize the “skinny” line neatly, but then I started reading the poem contrapuntally (I wrote it to be read up to down left column then right column; but I think there’s another reading in left to right across columns). Also thinking about language—as if a poem could speak for more than just itself. I think its ok to not know what every word means in what you read; what’s more important is understanding what language can do to you, do for you, or do outside of you.
Hope you are keeping warm in these (literally and figuratively) cold times.
Fiery, Ricky