Halo
Andy Stallings
I move around you
easily as around
a sudden liminality
of pixels in the
blank weird
of sensation
vision's prismatic
density brought near
to a threshold
of speech
& distributing
shards of what
you will hereafter
figure as the sensile
universe each
fragment of which
displays such tender
pattern recognition
such broad partitions
of your presumed
identity that you
begin to shake
your skin develops
distance you are
absorbed into
a spectrum
swapping one
agitated hue for
one erased texture
an annual
arrangement for
an hour of truth
etcetera & you
produce a deep
but intermittent halo
of partializing
sequence you
place your forearm
through a frosted
plate glass &
in the whitening
splash of aftermath
you emerge as an
angle of incidence
in a wave's
trajectory through
matter & time
obverse side
of the image of
an intersection
in which a vehicle
crossing after red
relinquishes its
color & its shape
inside the body of
another vehicle
& in so doing
defines you as
a livable facet
of the actually
astonishing world
Andy Stallings lives in New Orleans with Melissa Dickey and their three children. His first book, To the Heart of the World, will be out in the fall with Rescue Press.
