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Laurie Price was in NYC not too long ago and I asked her to come over to my place so that I could record her reading from her new book of poems, These Pages Once Were Skin.
Laurie Price, a world traveler who is now residing in Oaxaca, Mexico, is a photographer, mixed media artist, and poet. As the title of her new book suggests, what exists between the poet and the word, the artist and the material, the foot along the path on the way to take a photograph is creation itself, nothing more and nothing less.
The Be-Here-Now quality of this new work can be seen, heard, and felt in the following poem.
Action
There’s a future speeding towards you.
Supportable. There is exact trust.
There’s the inclination to describe
confusing a silver auto at night
with light. Three things clock in
at the divine surface of a color’s red.
Matamoros becomes Murguía. Undebatable
even as the lights change.
In the video below Laurie Price reads from These Pages Once Were Skin. Enjoy.
Four more poems from These Pages Once Were Skin follow.
Blood parallel
Never in the history of calming down
has anyone ever calmed down
by being told to calm down.
Alarms go off every quarter hour
reminding some to pay more
attention to helicopters
since they hover or
sideswipe thought.
Why don’t I find out once
and for all what’s going on?
Cross-examined, there’s
a lot to think. Blood iron
bruise. Metallic alloys.
The mountains’ iron dirt
layers copper with purples
and with air this thin
it becomes hard to breathe.
Everything’s an emergency.
The world in the word in the work
is the work. The work in the world
is a word.
Wake me with poetry! Letters
trace the lost. Sing to me eyes
closed just ever so slightly
off tune as if you really
mean it.
On Your Way
If I seemed to sentence myself with
gravity, less vertical than clunkage
and your words failed to reach me
or rather, all the letters akimbo across
the Atlantic and down over the Keys to
not reach me well then metal and wood,
meddle if they could, I’d have to bail.
A memory made too clear, stereo voice,
anticipation parallel with hope,
a pheromone in its own right,
would not exceed your belief. Or mine.
Let’s talk about it then, about how a spark
seemed to point to some future moment
when. And then this is when. You are on
your way. This is that day we agreed to
wait for, and we did it, speechless.
Forget it
when inflection bleeds from
eyebrows arched and arrowed
toward a hook-like pout.
When a put-in gawk
cleaved to angers & doubt
draws endlessly down:
Fuck you and your frown.
Milagro
If with care towards promise
I break my silent vow
to enter, opened
as no other place will allow.
There ought to be a name for this.
Okay I’m going to sit very still now
watch October squeeze the light
to a thin line. My friends
are always with me
dead or alive and music changes things
or my hands too are not the same. Here
there’s a green glass
with a clear stem
and you in green leaf
of pressed maple. October
is written on the sky
seen from a rock. All the hard things
are here to stay. Durable, this duration
of unbuttoning the blushes
invents a shift in color. Everything
here plus you.
These Pages Once Were Skin is published by Spuyten Duyvil Press. You can check it out here:
https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/These-Pages-Once-Were-Skin.html
Here is more about Laurie Price and her work:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/CorrugatedshadowsArt
here:
https://www.laurie-price.com/about
and here:
Después de la Mundanza (After the Move): the Art and Adventures of Laurie Price