this or that beauty. how is one to distinguish? I, opening. tree unfolding tree. recall prayer, how our legacy is of tying it to a post in the desertand abandoning it. O flag so stupid a gash in the sky falling forever leaves, light,nothing’s separatethe world is its atmosphere, also a small gap of scorched earth between two types of living what is between life whatis between time what moves? clouds move by breezes you cannot feel
Tree
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- May 17, 2024
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“Tree” from OUR AIR: by Nora Treatbaby.
Published by Nightboat Books on February 27, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Nora Treatbaby.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
"Thudding through the spine of Nora Treatbaby’s Our Air is her observation 'it is vulnerable to be in awe.' These poems’ political promise is to render us vulnerable: uncovering the source of our wounds so we may touch them. Here, dominant grammars self-destruct and love springs forth from a seed, no longer the property of the naive. Tracing the grotesque shards of capitalist detritus and preaching metaphysical axioms, Treatbaby is our theologian at the end of a world that is ceaselessly refusing to end. I’d follow her anywhere.
—Rosie Stockton
"Delphic, ecstatic, erotic, mystical, riotous, erudite, Our Air rests on the osmosis of surfaces that seemingly exist in a paradoxical state, both as filters and screens. Our Air is a critique of the sutures, the tightness of waged existence, of rent, of regulation, of subjugation, nursed by an accurate distrust of the substance of 'progress': profits grow but cannot flower. Our Air dissolves strictures and binaries with epigrammatic tenderness."
—Adelita Husni-Bey
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