Jami Macarty, The Minuses

Through the Branches

Oranges as your kiss opens my mouth

forgetting where we are in a park full of mockingbirds.

When my eyes open I promise to tell the truth.

The truth changes.

A vulture eclipses. I become

the sun. A hanging swarm.

Seeing everywhere at once every thing

I cancel us to cross the desert. Solvitur ambulando.

Scent of sun on your forearm reverts to memory.

The casita’s roof absorbed into the mountain’s forged shadow.

From this angle the sky parts mesquite branches.

There’s an occurrence bright enough to notice.

The debut full-length poetry title by poet and editor Jami Macarty, who “lives between Tucson, Arizona and Vancouver, British Columbia,” is The Minuses (Louisville CO: The Center for Literary Publishing, 2020). The poems in The Minuses are composed as accumulations of declarations and description, that concurrently linearly build, and collage as lyric patchworks. Macarty writes on violence both domestic and ecological; writing the moments between the language and the lines, and out the other end of comprehension. Through The Minuses, she writes out a great deal of violence from a variety of perspectives, from the direct to the slant, even as she writes, to close the poem “Without Is Guide”: “I am repeating how I feel // My skin outward like intercepting leaves // In the throttle climate // The knife and fist climate // After lovemaking everyone is sad [.]” This is, as the back cover attests, a book of distress, of trauma, of witness: of, as she writes to open “Resuscitation,” “How we behave in drought and anticipation.”