Lori Anderson Moseman
On Ice
We're anchovies above water
moving in prescribed directions.
No, not the same, that's how we shimmer. There's little ones who
zip, there's the tag game going double time. There's the hip
swaying orienting ourselves to oldies, reinventing
Sunday, schooling on ice. No longer in the hull
on a transatlantic haul. We're self-propelled -- flow
changed its state. Take a fish knife from your hand,
make it a blade for your foot. Adapt. Prayer shawls and veils,
fleece caps and woolens. Old world ways weave
awareness. The give in our knees not weakness
but an attention that cushions what careens our way.
Untitled
Skinning knife slips. Fishy
Id mistakes her own flesh for fish -- too frozen to feel necessary
difference
at midnight (by day she's machete to forest's devilsclub dividing -- divining
-- the merchantable).
The
conch at her ear says: shellfish, then sell fish, so selfish.
Her favorite foto in the Guggeheim's Moving Image exhibition was still. An
outline of a fish,
two marbles rolled (presumably) into the belly. Not as eyeballs. Nothing to
see, save the toe of a tattered shoe in the foreground ("below"
the fish). "Nike Territory" says the title. Child labor the subject.
Or Christian fertility. Or the way monopoly is played below the border: no
plastic hotels for Park Place -- just marbles to gamble.
Fishy Id believed God steadied
her. That's what I thought she meant when she said she "went steady"
with God,
wearing into the doug-fir woods the enamel fish shape she bought at the bible
bookstore.
Genre
is the outline you carve in the dirt with your pocket knife.
Identity
is multiple -- the marbles you roll into the outline turned icon.
This is no miracle. This
is a practiced labor. Multitudes remain unfed
(as in hungry, as in not yet federated, beyond the fed's concern).
Bio:
Lori Anderson Moseman's poetry collections are Walking the Dead (Heaven Bone, 1991) and Cultivating Excess (The Eighth Mountain Press, 1992). Persona, her new book due out this fall, is inhabited by Fishy Id, Bog Girl, Canoehead and Subway Bride. As Canoehead, Anderson Moseman portages her canoe in urban spaces (elevators, escalators, factories) to make videopoems about transport and carrying capacity. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop as well as an MFA in electronic arts from iEAR Studios. Check out her "Atomic Nature of Ma" in the hot-off-the-press Terra Nova anthology, Writing on Air (MIT Press, 2003).
