Of the Morrow's Sweet Expanse (Diptych)

Abstract

46 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 cover feature art poetry Panel I Assignment Zero: mis(s)- conception She is already here Or is it “I”? Antecedent that simply replied to her telluric calling first? Chimer of a “tick-tock vacancy” Body, any body in heat (of telling) Waiting Fating to be conscripted to serve ages of human time in one run of hope Or is it Mother? split-off- tongue cry(o)genic Gape of langue she still has no love in but incantation: Oocyte cele ovum cite Game-to-cite Blastocyte cele laukia tikisi ji laukia Ootid tikisi iki She is blast tiki laukia Blast wish laukia 12 ji tikisi iki Waiting tikisi iki to laukia Lull of null laike Gametocyte laukia A site of sight blasto counting site laukia ji tikisi ji Meiotic dance One zero(whirl) of show Meantime Fiona’s Wunderkammer clocks strike Habitat Reverter’s somber U-turn bells As in some ancient snake world of the wrong way time Ouroboros connecting night to night’s own tail of madness, badness and the World’s all sadness Or is this Noose twist of the future in yet another habitat bent wrong to do time for the gloom apportioners we never bargained for? Time wizens BTW at god’s “Sky(go)vernor” emporium and on the shelves there among mickle other “things un-living” are goods endangered some say babies Lithuanian are ticking low on stock Of the Morrow’s Sweet Expanse (Diptych) by Rita Malikonyte Mockus WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 47 Panel II Liniment: update(a)bility for “first-person singular” app [But wait] the world is way more hip than I my passé life and its uneasy slip Together, world and I we need to rest from me, say, carve a citadel out from the unfinished fear of see to soothe the fruit held crosswise barb(juiced) fibers of a private dark your darkling. Wake up, it’s time to begin / The forgetting Textual notes: Excerpted from a tetraptych (four-panel poem). Repetition of the phrase ji tikisi tiki laukia (Panel I) is in Lithuanian. It means“hoping, re-hoping, in-hoping, and waiting inside time.”The word iki means“until”and cele means “a cell.”Last sentence in Panel II is a quote from Ben Lerner. above Kampas, Nukryziuota Obelis (Crucified apple tree), 1993. Private collection. opposite Fiona Hall, Wrong Way Time, 2012–15 (detail), © the artist. Courtesy of the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Australia. Image credit: Clayton Glen. Rita Malikonyte Mockus, born in Lithuania, is a poet, performer, and translator. Her poetry was published in Salos (Sviesa Press, Lithuania). Mockus wrote a cycle of poems for the Electroshock Label, Russia, and her work“Yoin”was performed at the National Philharmonic of Lithuania. Mockus also read her poetry at the City of Asylum’s (Pittsburgh) Jazz Poetry Concert. Australian artist Fiona Hall’s installation Wrong Way Time— currently on view at the 56th Venice Biennale—responds to the perilous state of the environment and to our own “madness, badness, and sadness stretching beyond the foreseeable future.” Rimvidas Jankauskas“Kampas” (1957–1993) was a prominent Lithuanian abstract expressionist painter and one of the most temperamental, unrestrained, and rebellious personalities in the Lithuanian art scene of the 1990s. ...