You are the bull’s eye
You are the bull’s eye.
You are the bull’s eye in my dream.
Your eye, directed at me
In the field.
I am so much field.
Your eye in the field
Does violence to me.
I lose sight of your eye
And I do violence to you.
Neither of us touch each other.
Though we move
To each other as to a target.
But the bull in the field is stone.
In the field I let you go like some flash
I would carry in my retina.
I fantasize about the stone in my retina.
The stone, a thing that presses down.
I cannot see past it.
My retina got stuck in the pool of itself.
You are my retina like a rind.
You are my retina like a rind of stone.
You are the image of my origin, pressing down
On me like a father or mother.
I press my nails into your image.
I get lost there.
I need help against you even though you don’t exist.
I milk my longing for you
Like I’m a cow with an udder full of milk.
I produce the milk of pain.
All the milk of pain floods my eyes like a swamp.
I swim in the thick of you.
You smell like a rind.
I do not know where you are, but I press my nails into you,
I scrape against you
With my love.
The stone of you scrapes me. But that is just a dream.
This is a dream field, a field dream.
My body is intact,
Blank as shot.
I mirror you. I am alone.
I repeat my location to myself.
You are a scorpion in my eye.
My eye is a large scar of you.
I cannot see past my scar.
I cannot see past the scorpion.
I suck the rind of your stone.
I suck your rind like I suck on history.
It goes beyond the edges of my body.
I wish I could enter the stone.
I want to enter the stone.
The stone that drops like a horrid tear.
I suck your foundations.
But you are not a stone.
I have no mouth.
I have no body.
I cannot tell. Drowning in everything
That has no angle,
Like a swamp, like a sea.
This is not love.
This is not love.
This is simply a book being written.
This is desire bleeding out the sides
Of the page,
Desire like a balloon,
Desire like a bull with its one horn
And your one horn of eye
Or mine
As we divide each other
With a desire,
As we divide each other
Like a piece of writing
I read,
A piece of writing,
Piece by piece
Like tasting a horn,
A bullet,
A thing that penetrates
The field
Like an eye
But in the eye is also the field
And it is the eye that fills up
It is the eye that is an opening
A net
To catch desire,
To hold it like a rind
Of origin, an origin
Of smithereen,
An eye that opens and opens
Until there is nothing to see
Or be seen, nowhere to see
Or be seen, although a voice
Keeps opening onto the
Field, opening
Like a grain in a sea,
And the grain is buoyant.
The grain does not sink.
It is the grain that reveals
The surface of a depth,
That tells the story
Of all that moves before it,
So we can see what moves the grain,
So we can tell of all that
Moves the grain.
Contributor(s)
Simone Kearney
Simone Kearney is a poet and artist, living in Brooklyn, NY. She is author of one full-length book of poetry, DAYS (Belladonna Press, 2021), and the chapbooks My Ida (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), and In Threes (Minute BOOKS, 2013). Other publications include The Brooklyn Rail, Lit Hub, Boston Review, Jubilat, Post Road Magazine, and Riot of Perfume, among others. She has exhibited her artwork nationally and internationally. (Photo credit: Matthew Paulson)
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