Name Notes
Joan Alice Tate

After Alice Notley

You are not dead where I come from

I have never told a lie

In this vision chair

I am held aloft by song

Sometimes shooting from my tips

And tongues and vesicles 

And thus I was soar afraid

A compulsion

Looking down at the air-tones

A compulsion

Writhing up to meet me

I have been run through with the terror of being one thing

Absconded all the gunfire of our time

To be dead would be not not so bad

Or so grand

I am repeating something venomous as a specter

Feebly some voice 

I took from your pocketbook

No

You gave me

In the cemetery

I was wanting to die

Under the crepe myrtle there

All the starvation of heart

There which kills slower

There which kills others

More painful

Rent which is frightening

Grief which is frightening

A wave as a way of condensing

I confess I stole your name

All of life in two

This preordained folly

I hear our mistakes as I make them

Alice I loved you

Before I ever knew you

Alice I loved you

Drowned beneath the dock as a child

Knocking up at it 

A door I kissed 

Let the brine

Inside me

Something tugged me up and I didn’t drown there 

Where I come from you’re very much alive

Alice I loved you

In the hell where we were 9

And looking so bright in the ink

A confederate cemetery you sent me 

Free from confederate cemeteries

Confess

I took your name

Your graves punched through my bodies

Just like stones

I have been in your dreams

Where I burst into motes of sand

You could feel with the edge of your eyes

So never simple

So long before I met you

Tell me there you were

Oh Alice

Tell me where you've lodged yourself in time