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Life Of The Mind I’ve been a potato since the last time it rained. In the dank I grow pitiful and leathery, but I grow nonetheless like a knot on a spine. I can see a new heart sprouting on my inner ear, beat in the cupped chests of quartz pebbles. Kerspark. Kerspark. Something catches, a telegram in the throat, a glowworm in dirt and the night frogs find my heart-song, learn to sing along, little kaisers of the night, and then coyotes hear my song and holler— And then the children out late marauding hear my heart-song and they shriek with mushroom delight, sucking tiny fires into their lungs, blowing ash from their own heart-studded eardrums. But what’s most strange in the dark, in a dirt cell where the cold sits on my eyes, is the sound of my own heart beating from two loci, like a drum circle it beats in my tuber head then in my nightshade chest, echo and echo and echo deprived of speech but not of sound, a headlit train in a tunnel under a river, muted until it can’t help but scream, screaming until it screeches to a stop, forcing the weight of thirst and hunger into a pea-sized body attached to the base of the brain. My whole tumidity howls to its terminus in the starless garbage pale. PRAISE FOR ILLUMINATRIX In one of her amazing poems, Alexis Orgera writes “I am afraid … / to tell you the truth” and this is just one of the many lies she tells. You don’t have to read much of Illuminatrix to know Orgera isn’t afraid of MUCH. These poems reveal a poet doing the hard work of poetry, observing the world and transcribing it through the filter of language. Orgera’s ears are a tuning fork she places against metaphor and imagery to create the natural sounds of a world that demands our attention. —Rick Bursky, author of The Soup of Something Missing The effects of reading Alexis Orgera’s Illuminatrix and stargazing are similar. Her language flickers and beckons in the darkness, and you are aware of, and maybe even seized by, a cosmic energy. A kind of garish emptiness shines through the pinholes of these poems—desire and days, and yes, light too is dying. It’s the very same ache you got that night you realized the light took so long to reach you that the stars are already dead. You’re not sure whether the word stuck in your head is light or blight—and you must hurl your body back outside tonight and look again. This is the right book to reread in the dark. —Darcie Dennigan, author of Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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