Julie Phillips Brown

from The Adjacent Possible

 

One emerges, a small vertical at the riveredge. One watches, waves as. By the
bank, waking. Wan to the river’s wake, one.

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One scales a rising, back to the hills and climbing fullheight. The rocks cast rocks
upon rocks. One angles with the earth’s rise, flight skyward.

 
 
 

One sounds the waters, breaks toward a bottom of delimitation. Fathomless       remains
the river, remains one       each at the last.

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One rifles over the prospect of scapular hills, scans a metered distance. Breath
and analogous cloud surface the mountain.

 
 
 

One furls the tongue at the riveredge, uncinctures the word and the real. Cracked
breath of language. One slips under, wonders       seeded dream.

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One turns the eye under cloudcover, an open pool—blue running onto blue,
lapsed distances. One blinks at haze of ice       snowfall

 
 
 

One flowers among the watery veils       outpalm, open

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A cloudself

 
 
 

Under under. Unaccountable, one is countless, fathomless, and alone. Words form as burrs and pits. The
river       the mouth weeps.

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One dearticulates toward an unthinking unthought       Scatters unrelational, spun
pinions        mind of atmosphere

 
 
 

One is one, suffices.

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One strikes out toward the proposition. One traces over a wide of snowfall.
One in one’s own drift, watching. One wakes as air—

Julie Phillips Brown is a poet, painter, scholar, and book artist. After earning an M.F.A and a Ph.D. at Cornell University, she served as the N.E.H. Post-Doctoral Fellow in Poetics at Emory University’s Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Her poems and essays have previously appeared or are forthcoming in Angels of the Americlypse (Counterpath Press), Columbia Poetry Review, Conjunctions (online exclusive), Contemporary Women’s Writing (Oxford UP), Crab Orchard Review, delirious hem, Denver Quarterly, The Fight & The Fiddle, Interim, Jacket2, Mixed Messages (Manchester UP), North American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Wesleyan UP), Peregrine, Plume, Rappahannock Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Talisman, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vinyl, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Lexington, Virginia, where she teaches creative writing, studio art, and American literature.

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About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.