forgotten are the days when we speak into/ rather than away from/ a movement

Tracing The Shape…
Daniel Dissinger

I forgot to stop you and mention that before I heard your words, my innards were in place.

I forgot to stop you and mention that after I opened your book and devoured the spaces and language, all of my organs shifted their position and grew into thunders.

I met Daniel Dissinger in a mountainous village called Boulder, Colorado. The ghost of Ginsberg and Kerouac floated between the tiny buildings that resembled more of a summer camp than a university.

Gender did not matter when he tore open his binder full of thick lines, fluttered like a mad DJ between poems, scratching one into another. Anyone who ever experienced love for any type of person could enter into these ruminations.

Now, I own his chapbook, put out by Shadow Mountain Press, Tracing The Shape. This is a digestible journey of longing, body/earth salutations and connect-the-dot images of soil and skin.

and moving onto this skin of rain to get to her throat…

Dissinger questions within the observations of bone’s movements.

and then your hand reaches me where (?) I first feel thirst/ behind my lungs where (?) I realize the shape of dreams/ …she pulls at their arms and kisses the fragile forearms and wrists I imagine she could see mountains where (?)/ an explosion leveled this city and tulips where (?) a/ mother lost her child…

Within disfigurement, there are beaches. An ocean of want and promise. How to erase the stains of life from another?

this perfection
that is your(s)

scar …because he places
his lips over it

specifically

…

I am often moved by the oddities around me. Beyond poems. Sometimes, it is just through a simple gesture of a man getting up to allow exhausted woman a place to sit on subway. Or, maybe it is a tiny bird testing out its wings in the middle of an empty street in Brooklyn. Or a performer on a small stage revisiting childhood and the memory of what used to be in a (newer) body finally executed correctly.

When I am moved, I rarely say so. I just gather up its sound and sensations and continue on.

Into this book, I speak:
yes

I feel:
gathered and guessed

I want:
more of this