Cling
Discovered a concrete way to buy clothes?
A way to wear an abstraction—
A way to paint beneath the skin—
But cotton inoculates us
against this attempt,
100%, crisscrossed, & mercerized
horizon to prophylactic horizon.
Across each tight stitch, each
carbonated step
presses its sheet & fancies
a speck of latent illustration.
Bowing to the appeal of pleats,
the frayed & loose pattern
soft petals off of its graph,
an occasional pocket
holding a spring
sets its self off.
by Jenna Cardinale and Bruce Covey
Process notes
We decided to write a series of poems in which collaborative shifts occurred in cross-current from the poem’s couplet structure. One of us began with a single line; the other completed the couplet then began a new couplet. In each case the titles came last.
