I say Incremona to myself a lot—blame Italian movies. I love the films of Nathaniel Dorksy. Once I asked him a question in a room of people before the SFMOMA closed (for what seems like ever) though I cannot remember what the question was. We rely on technology to remember for us (and then this). I depend on parentheticals and even scrub my life of some. I can hear people on the street. I sent my parents that article about death and IDEO and they read it and now they’re reading that book on tidying because I just couldn’t shut up about it. My dad’s excited. My mom seems a little scared; I have come to realize she’s not as organized as I am. Poems are attempts at miscommunication in addition to its opposite and I can’t promise to tell you anything after that, at least not this. You use the life you’re in to create forms. Yesterday morning I remembered how wonderful it is to not know everything.
Nathaniel Dorsky (still) August and After
Linear Motor
I am here for my sister with a voice
like a boat if it wasn’t the first time
someone had given me a present
they wanted. Tuesdays are hard for
me, he wasn’t calling me babe, in
August and after Dorsky, sitcoms as
someone’s brother. I left my house to
ride the pedestrian wave, ever since
procedure there is in me a sea. Of
orchids and peasants moss became
an echo laced by the front door
sounding furious to its own dim
hands. Incremona!, there is no color
but things, I work with my feelings or
his red bicycle. (Line.) It took weeks
to clear up the mess, what I have is my
mouth I think to the women passing.
I still need buttons from the store.
History moves in circumstantial years
as artless practice for later entrance
ports. This is about that. Explanatory
holy work in the depths.
***
Amanda Nadelberg is the author of Bright Brave Phenomena (Coffee House, 2012), Isa the Truck Named Isadore (Slope Editions, 2006) and two chapbooks: Building Castles in Spain, Getting Married (The Song Cave, 2009) and Delphiniums (speCt!, 2013). A third book of poems, Songs from a Mountain is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2016. She lives in Oakland.
THE HOME SCHOOL 