Amanda Ackerman

Human Time Poem: It Will End When It Ends, And Then This Changes

There are two men and two women, but this does not matter because they are all just one person, cycling. There are many forms of time, like ancestral time, a day or year on each planet, like how long a day really is if you measure the earth’s rotation differently. He wants to sleep with her and her, both of them. The women don’t want to compete. One of them takes the other one’s hand to show solidarity. This is not hostile. Their hems touch. There are cycles within cycles, and worlds within worlds. A man sits so wide. It became a tired and axially misarranged knot, everything was stuck, when the women could no longer turn into the men, and the men could no longer turn into the women. They are mythological. Time is supposed to be their masterpiece. Someone says, tearfully, “I did it because I was desolate. And because I was desperate. I’ve seen the future, and it does not end. Until it ends. It will end when it ends. Then this changes.” One of them says, “I want to buy my body back. My body wants to buy me back. I/body wants I/body. It does not want to buy.” Each of them decides to travel to the four corners of the earth to take up residence, the two poles and the opposite ends of the tropical equator. They bring buckets, they take off their hats, and mythological creatures are never self-censoring when they begin to disgorge profit and unnecessary constraint. In the center of the center there is a flare that is neither dull nor still.

Amanda Ackerman is the author of four chapbooks: Sin is to Celebration (co-author, House Press), The Seasons Cemented (Hex Presse), I Fell in Love with a Monster Truck (Insert Press), and Short Stones (forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press). She is co-publisher and co-editor of the press eohippus labs. She also writes collaboratively as part of the projects SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS and U.N.F.O. (The Unauthorized Narrative Freedom Organization), whose collaborative audio text project Explanation as Composition was recently featured at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.