hotel’s liminal :: blurs / anywhere-ness / any- :: one-ness / then merges back into the tricky on- :: ramp of your own lonesome skin
~
propane deep blue clouds :: with gaslit underbellies :: reflected back in glass-bright sloughs / red-winged blackbirds :: studding the mile marker posts
~
cherry pit stop gas :: and casino / minnows and ammo :: bait worms out back! fueling on the precipice :: of springtime’s epoch ellipse
~
semiology :: spink → wakonda → vanitas → :: overpass may be icy → jesus saves → BOW-X-HUNT → :: tea adult supercenter
from the poem #ontheroad in Lee Ann Roripaugh's latest chapbook, #stringofbeads (2023)
#stringofbeads is an homage to Heian-period Japanese poet Princess Shikishi’s elegant series of linked tanka journaling her days, experiences, and psychological weather—with a lens particularly oriented toward questions of place, ecopoetics, and climate change. #stringofbeads honors both the impulse and practice of Princess Shikishi’s poetics, but in a way that explores contemporary contexts, images, themes, intellectual discourses, and technology. Highways, airports, Pokemon, comics, and social media are all a part of this poet’s daily life and interactions, and are deliberately included within the frame. Determined by the aleatoric minutiae of chance encounters and observations, these tanka are meant to unfold in simple, attentive, daily gradations—like a strand of beads or pearls.
