twenty-one homophonic couplets

anachronism
enacts a chrism
      
       *

convince me
connivance be

       *

abysmal attitudes
as be mal altitudes

       *

nourish the flower
flourish in the now or —

       *

belated salvation steers souls
on serrated shelves of stars born

       *

terra infirma
terror firm

       *

pleading with signs
sine waves bleating

       *

eyes encased in ice
in case the I is sliced

       *

tangential
tan genitals

       *

for lest nature we dread or forget
forge tree wood’s new depth

       *

seashore, bladderwrack, seaweed
shoal’s wreck, leeward more unset

       *

tabula rasa
erase errata

       *

strangury
strange augury

       *

classical architrave
collapsible archive of

       *

whatever I was, am, or aim to be
whether steam or soul, shame fully

       *

Ronald Johnson’s justice
jouissance for ever/us

       *

night thoughts, shudders,
shapes knot mind-shutters

       *

perforated ulcer
pulse, pour forth

       *

worn out with this indeterminacy
in the deep wake shorn of history

       *

jetting angels’s filigrees
fierce angles of geometry

       *

aphasic
“a phase” [sic]

— Jon Curley (© 2008)

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