From Mantis 5

ALFRED ARTEAGA

LILAC, SERIAL, STASIS

the color lies

there bleeds in fact

in kind of sequence

freezing being less

the quality of seeming

one being one color,

than thus the scent before

all accounts solitary, the

disaffected flourish

in words so like that, dream of the woman having sex beside one huge

lake, perhaps there are dunes there or ice, perhaps it is summer, her

mouth water, lilac; perhaps she lies, there acts, for some dream

quality of survival she enumerates freely, her sex wet lilac, one

body zero till two beside yet again, another lake, small and tense

hers is a personal algorithm

the way she recounts scent

and dream like metonym

for what is lake

but wet depression

what one body,

but one body of water

free of recourse, median,

free of meaning

and too, hers the quantity

of one body evident

there in the subsequent hours

in chance reference

causal inexorable

fragrant and fixed

belying so weak the violet urging

lacking pulse totally

violet the dream lake there

every couple a duplicate,

the one, violet duplicitous

for there has been no dream, yet still really huge, that lake, dunes

there in variance as is the ice, yes, an ice summer fugue and still

life dune redolent as it is static, so no it is no night dream,

rather more a confused daylight, the dream being after all a mere

issue of ordering, there alone beside a body of water, in solitude in

betrayal in duplicity she lies there alone a duplicate, acts coupled,

a duplicity in fact