Dictums OG-107, Ceremony V

I. I was channeled, spoken by that sunburst.

II. Vaulting through wide crevices of noun, our rooms were filled with music.

III.  Only then described by reoccurrence, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote—There Is No
Question—but our spectacle of green. And you were channeled, too.

IV. To vocalize as such, to multiply, that build-up shone among our bodies. Voices shot up through these stems.

V. Voluminous and gossamer, I piled every flower on our altar.

VI. Red flowers then burned.

VII.  In lying down, I glistened. Vestibules were parted, hungering like bushes. Then that sweetness came and left.

VIII. That was our preservation, offering up prayers like a scent. I could not amplify.

IX. Adjacent then.

X. To varnish without drink, to drink without a cup, that water drank us slowly.

XI. Sparrows stuffed into this wall inside our empty room, though nothing more could shock us after 1963.

XII. Then costumes changed. Each sparrow gripped a knife between their tiny beaks. An olive green was varnished, clipped, subsumed just like our own.

XIII.  Who stole away, lastly, each flower from our altar?

Sophia Terazawa

SOPHIA TERAZAWA is a poet of Vietnamese-Japanese descent. She is the author of two chapbooks: Correspondent Medley (winner of the 2018 Tomaž Šalamun Prize, published with Factory Hollow Press) and I AM NOT A WAR (a winner of the 2015 Essay Press Digital Chapbook Contest). Her work appears in The Offing, Puerto del Sol, Poor Claudia, and elsewhere. She is currently working toward the MFA in Poetry at the University of Arizona, where she also served as poetry editor for Sonora Review.

Contributions by Sophia Terazawa