Zen Song
Every day the dream renews
this is good and exhausting news
I try to be a mountain stream
something consistent through the dream
I try to love the doors that close
trust and pray that something knows
(why)
The Silk Pantry
my body smells erotic
there is no lover near
I’m edible & I’m alone
in a silk brassiere
I wake up wanting to feed you
to remember I can feel
let me sweetly kindly
prepare you a sweet meal
sex warms my collarbones
and hunger wets the air
I’m edible & I’m alone
a Lady’s cross to bear
didn’t mean to hurt you — or myself
get back in the can and back on the shelf
Terrain of the Sleeping Serpent
come into my pelvis
& tell me what you see
I’ve been dying to know
what she knows
but I can’t bend
my body enough
to see her
eye to eye
once a doctor
looked in there
with lights and tools
and everything
but he didn’t tell me
what he saw
Perversions
Someone is pressing
my body against something
which smothers my thoughts
& delivers me from considering
nauseous realities of aging eyeballs,
betrayal, and permanent stains
to feel slight beneath a pair of hands
and to perch myself upon
the perfectly painful branch
curly gold head
lamb in the bed
Sun-gilded pain
laughing and slain
Clear Glass
Black Frame
a youthful body
in an ancient game
They are acting like they have something to prove to Nature herself, some bullish thing they need to rub in her face. The big metal tool is tightening around the soft object at the waist, cranking from all directions - we're bulging, ribs are getting pushed aside. What's the point of being a doll in in this black-magic hypnosis. I don’t want any more numbers attached to my name. I'm sick of being squished, documented and measured. Please, no more airport machines X-Raying my organs. No more photographic evidence of evil slicing into my psyche. I don’t want to take your pills to keep up. I love, and believe in the tender creatures of the earth, even if they mock me for it. I’m fed up of them trying to kill us all the time. Why are they trying to kill us all the time?
The rocks cut my feet but the sun is warm on my face, the salt stings my cuts but the sea is fresh. I’m unsure why I'm so rigid in the flowing water. I'm cramming so much in the air of my life, I'm reaching to touch it, and the world is crawling all over me. Where can I unroll my mind, which doctor has a comfortable chair? The more I see, the more I untether from feeling real. I think I should go away from men and people and everyone who expects something of me, especially good behaviour. I am in the immobile underground, my gaze will not move, my eyes grab onto tiny things and try to make other worlds. When will my heart break open, and liberate the worms and eagles inside?
I think of gazelles and zebras running in groups, I think of the music of thousands of hooves beating the earth, the blood, joy and endurance in their hearts and the force which animates it. Their heaving lungs and bristled pelts of cells piled on cells, I think of where it comes from. It seems like it fell out of an open heart.
Flurries of Doves is an intimate letter to a world alight with paradox, composed of fifteen poems written by Alyssa Bunce & photography by Brin Schoellkopf. It's a gathering of relics from one's desire to survive a dream that contains Everything: avowing an urge contextualize & befriend wonder, which, for the author, exists alongside extraordinary tragedy and despair.
The Teachings of Miraculous Fish
excerpts
vii.
in a vision I see
the centre of the earth
as a heart
pumping the tears of saints
thru underground springs
that defy odds
making it to the surface
splitting the crust of hatred
x.
maybe one day
I will laugh so hard
that I vomit up fear
and the grin in the sky
will unravel before me
and we will laugh together
May I Believe the World is Good?
excerpts
How will I survive if I forget that the world is good? I mean to tread her body collecting proof, so I’ll stay alive; like when I found a robins egg vacated in the sandy sage, I held it in my hand while I walked, and when I laid it on the earth, I laid my own body beside it and overhead an eagle circled in wide glory. Once a four year old led me by the hand to a pasture of newborn goats suckling their mother. I saw a cactus clinging to a slope slouched in a brilliant sculpture, and even as that man spoke to me of horror, a puppy slept beside me curled in a heavenly knot. The original atom, the innermost seed, had particles bouncing inside it but it was mostly empty space, 99.9% empty space. It’s gone on expanding and proliferating from the inside out creating larger forms that are also mostly empty space, and invisible birds flit through the allies of infinity between particles and most of the world is emptiness, hot with secret benevolent law which cannot be spoken. The ants scuttling in subterranean masses have a declaration painted in their empty-space brains saying “The world is Good. She has Always Been Good. We will all be fossils or worm excrement or ocean sludge soon, and the World is Good.” The ancient fish creature clumsily navigating the primordial water said “I Must Live” and the water was frigid and all it saw was pale blue and it pushed out legs and bloomed lungs and dragged itself into the shock of oxygen.
Brin Schoellkopf, Flurries of Doves, 2023