The Ruler of Rusted Knees
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You were the king of all the abandoned bathtubs
and I was the king of air/space/ time/ questions unlucky fuzzy key chains and speech. Were you jealous? Um, sorry (?) I was never / actually kidding. |
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In the beginning, we made birds chirps translated into the language of broken chairs.
No one exactly understood us, so they called us wise. This was before the bloody fedoras, before the arrival of floating leaf territory. |
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Try to balance like an idea, like a balanced of balance like on another idea, on many ideas |
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Back then—you were the ruler of plastic wrap, lost words and I was the ruler folded origami-style |
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A man with double eights in his halo is lucky. A man without a head and double eights Can a man have a halo without a head? If a man is lucky and unlucky at once, If you try to be lucky, If want to be unlucky, |
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In the beginning, we didn’t need to be friends with all the parts of ourselves.
It was enough to listen to the wind tear the world to pieces. Later, the wind swallowed parts of ourselves we had no name for but missed terribly. |
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We had happened in many different somewheres, and everywheres, Like the taste of teeth space around a loose flag. |
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You can be the king of whatever–the-hell you believe Take light, If you whispered to the light, say you were its flashing was a product |
In our mixed-media literary project, Egyptian gods, stripped of their context and role, wander various New York City neighborhoods trying to figure out where they belong, how to make sense of what they have lost, and how to get along with one another.
In the first step of our project, Toni Simon constructs three-dimensional, small-scale figurines out of paper, modeled on Egyptian gods. She then paints them with abstract, graphic details. We then take the little gods out into different neighborhoods and take hundreds of photographs of them. We select eight to ten images, which become the basis for a series of poems written by Joanna Fuhrman.
So far, we have created picture/poem serial combinations in Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Chinatown, the Reversible Destiny Studio, Red Hook and Gowanus (featured here). Parts of the project have appeared online in paperbag and Talisman and in print in the 100th issue of Hanging Loose.
Joanna Fuhrman is the author of four books of poetry, most recently “Pageant” (Alice James Books 2009) and “Moraine” (Hanging Loose Press 2006), as well as the chapbook “The Emotive Function” (Least Weasel Press 2011). She teaches poetry writing at Rutgers University and through Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Other sections of her project with Toni appear online at paperbag and Tailsman and in print in the journal Hanging Loose. For more see: Joannafuhrman.com