Imaginary Portraits

Reviews

Imaginary Portraits by Joshua Ware

Imaginary Portraits
by Joshua Ware
Greying Ghost, 2013
Limited Edition / Chapbook Page

My thumb surfs Instagram. I sit at my desk to write this. I am constantly distracted by a false reality. There are people I know there. They are eating tacos, taking pictures of sunsets, their partner stares out from a small screen I hold in my palm, I press like to let them know I see them. There is no way to escape our new duality, but I think it helps to be aware of this reality. Here is the problem: what is real or more real. How do we classify reality & does this change through location, movement, isolation. Joshua Ware introduces me to a world I know well. Here it is winter. I am wearing a hat. I am looking at myself as reflection. I am not sure it is really me.

A small blue book / It fits well in my hands. Small poems / Coy, they coax & murmur / I know you / the shape of darkness

You are dressed for winter, a chill in the air. Waiting. What forms do we take when met with a lens? How do we become a recreation/abstraction? How are we changed?

You sit atop a gray river / side rock, as water rush / swallows your voice, drowning you / by volume. The poet relocates to a new city. A traveling between two regions. Wind gusts through our private stillness. We are always somewhere. There is a struggle in always knowing where you are. Is it supposed to make you different? Should we expect change? Your muted / mouth opens a space for / poetry

Hello, avoidance. The escape plan proposal is returned, rejected. I sit at my desk with coffee. It is cold now. I feel this speaking to some part of me. No matter how surrounded I am there is loneliness in my body.

IMAGINARY PORTRAIT

In an otherwise darkened room
computer-light illuminates the contours of
your face, mimicking the neon shine of
an interstate motel sign that burns
through cornfield and prairie grass
somewhere in Middle America, as you drift
into a reverie of body parts, hoping to avoid looking at
yourself while you look at yourself
in a mirror. But your reflection
returns to you always in words
and the charred remains of cornstalks.