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    Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing: Poems
    Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing: Poems
    Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing: Poems
    Ebook76 pages24 minutes

    Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing: Poems

    By Lynn Emanuel

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    About this ebook

    Lynn Emanuel’s sixth collection of poetry is not sequential or straightforward. It has no conventional chronology, no master narrative. Instead, it is a life story, with all the chaos and messiness entailed therein. Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing is a commotion of grief and wit, audacious images, poems, and paragraphs. It explores and centers on the possibilities and limitations of art in the face of disappearances of many kinds, including the disappearance that is most personal—the poet’s own.

    —PLAGUE’S MONOLOGUE

    I erased the world so nothing can find it, snuffed out the roses, red and hot
    as the snouts of bombs, repealed the polar ice cap, even that fat oxymoron,
    the “industrial park,” has disappeared. And the last few words huddled
    together, like bees in a hive buzzing and plotting? I cut their throats
    with the scythe of a comma, turned the snout of my pen against them.
    I saved by erasing the streets and the people—let them be overgrown
    with absence. I don’t care—there is no limit to my appetite, my lust,
    my zeal for emptiness. But I know you—and you have kept a transcript
    of the disappearance.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Pittsburgh Press
    Release dateSep 12, 2023
    ISBN9780822990246
    Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing: Poems

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      Book preview

      Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing - Lynn Emanuel

      ONE

      I was a woman alone in the sea.

      Don’t tell anybody, I tell myself.

      Don’t try to remember this. Don’t document it.

      Remember: write down to not-document it.

                                    —BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY

      Nativity

                           I was a garden and you

      my gardener. I was a house,

                 you, my lodger,

                           lodged beneath my heart.

      My Heart, you were the fist that knocked

                 and knocked and I could not answer.

                           You starved me down

      until a glance could pass right through me

                 as I lay

                           on the obstetrician’s vinyl couch,

      under a shroud

                 that stank from Clorox.

                           They mined for you—

      their probes slick with

                 the scentless oils of technicians

                           for whom I must

      be opened, peeled back, forced

                 to look. And I did, as I was told—

                           not relax—exactly—but give myself up

      to your co-conspirators, who dug you

                 out of the blankness of my flesh,

                           parted the dark waters and suddenly,

      you came forth

                 a smudge of white against the ultrasound’s

                           blackness, you floated spectral and thickly

      pale, a magnolia floating in a bowl,

                 an elegant centerpiece. You had no heart,

                           were as minimal as a Mobius strip.

      But you had style. Even your disappearance

                 was oddly stylish, the way you resembled

                           more and more a comet,

      the wan tail of you grew

                 longer, more tenuous on the screen.

                           I saw you, calmly,

      and with endearing gravity take a nose dive

                 until the light blinked out and I was

                           no longer a house for an uninvited guest,

      nor a heaven for a gauzy constellation.

                 The screen went dark and I came back

                           to myself. I was no longer a ghost’s ghost.

      I was myself again. I was flesh. And living.

      After three weeks at the museum

      I saw the figures of the crucifixion

      In personal terms.

      Christ naked and asleep, eyes closed—

      dead to the world. She is unable to reconcile herself.

      The same old story—mind and body—

      A marriage on the rocks.

      Who killed him? Somehow, she seems implicated,

      Simply because

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