by Liam Strong
algebraic logic does not conform to the fragment or comma splice, Halsey. you can only swim & float in thought. your particles of profile, your particles of mascara. the squiggle of your childhood artistic ethos is a sentence. the period isn’t flesh, the period is standalone, standing alone, his sentence. in kindergarten you paint the sun with your finger & a single blotch of yellow. the nature of sky implores that it can’t bear tattoos. consequences of skin run amok like loose variables. it’s the ending, all in your mouth, which is also an ending, the ending within, period. blood. period. some things are just things & don’t need to be explained.
woodworking would make for a nice alternative, Halsey. your past selves & bodies as shaved decimals, poppled punctuation. dust requires more dust. it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. we fuck. we create more of ourselves. we fuck so we don’t have to witness sight of the end. we fuck ourselves. it’s a kind of revision, solving for m, pruning an essay into precision. does a cherry ever come out a perfect red. you trace etymology on your lips, Halsey, so the wood grain follows itself through its fabric. its lineage. its proof of being.
linguistics of scallops, Halsey. scallops, you know, the foraged mouth for the migrating tongue. you drive around for the right diner for hours long enough & Americana loses its appeal. think of Whorfianism, how the concept of “exotic” grammar characteristics omit the outside world. no influence. no predation. no aggregate detritus. sunbleached candy corn, Halsey, hand-me-down
conversation of the marrow. there’s no allegory, there’s no context, there’s no obligation to the plasma between us. there’s no nothing, no something, no everything. sanded talc with coarse affair. weathered & illiterate bone, whirring around. until blood coincidences a shape.
Halsey, you’re not a poet, but you’re a poet. you were born to be a poet. determinism could be wrong. ought to be wrong. for every two stones set in stone, kill them with a bird. osprey do the trick, as does a cormorant or sandhill crane. but if you kill every stone, Halsey, you’re left with excess stones. an opposing solution would be to say that no ceiling is ever really shattered. repairs are often made. repairs don’t always fix what they’re meant to. reparations functionally against us. poets can’t fix shit, but can fix everything.
because, Halsey, it’s because the thought must be, or intends, to be complete. no margin of error, a snow storm where every flake dances onto your tongue. because the region of the brain we form these ideas is larger than countries or continents. because hemispheres. because contemplation sounds too close to completion. because completion sounds synonymous with finishing. because finishing concludes without epilogue. because we need to be whole, not fragmented. because, apparently, dependence is a necessity, Halsey. because the first sentence of genesis can’t exist without something already broken.
h,a,l,s,e,y, / hall. z. ee.
a street. in brooklyn.
what.ever.you.do.dont.say.ash–
foliage.of.disambiguation:
[ h all s ee ]
| h | s | ee |
| hat | so | see |
sea.of.long.carpeted.options;garden.of.spooning.paths}
{rhymes.w/.algae.shallow.sea.pierogi.final
e.}
love.ends.w/.a.life.less.body.every.time.
say.ur.own.name.enough.aloud. &.u.go.deaf.
heresaprompttoconstructasentencewithoutusingasubjectoraverbohgoddamitwealreadyfailedhalseywhatarewegoingtodonow
Liam Strong (they/them) is a queer neurodivergent straight edge punk writer who has earned their BA in writing from University of Wisconsin-Superior. They are the author of the chapbook Everyone’s Left the Hometown Show (Bottlecap Press, 2023). You can find their poetry and essays in Impossible Archetype and Emerald City, among several others. They are most likely gardening and listening to Bitter Truth somewhere in Northern Michigan.
