"Tilt" by Julia Forrest
The Blue Question by Jay Besemer
for r.v.
in the half-light half-sound
we aren’t speaking now
because speech is hard & you
are dead two years & only
speak to me in dreams.
i am awake in the blue question
where your absence pulls me
like a shade.
before bed i drove invisible down
the streets of the town where you
lived looking for irrigation
for my wound that constant sun
flicking the window knowing
i wouldn’t find you just searching
for some place to be maybe for
a low stone wall to someday sit on
out of that sun. i don’t know the colors
of the fall leaves drifting across your
yard or how your front door sang
under your palm
or the sound of your breath or if you
were riding shotgun happy in
silence to let me find my own way.
in the half-light half-sound
we aren’t speaking now
because speech is hard & you
are dead two years & only
speak to me in dreams.
i am awake in the blue question
where your absence pulls me
like a shade.
before bed i drove invisible down
the streets of the town where you
lived looking for irrigation
for my wound that constant sun
flicking the window knowing
i wouldn’t find you just searching
for some place to be maybe for
a low stone wall to someday sit on
out of that sun. i don’t know the colors
of the fall leaves drifting across your
yard or how your front door sang
under your palm
or the sound of your breath or if you
were riding shotgun happy in
silence to let me find my own way.
Jay Besemer is the author of the poetry collections Theories of Performance (The Lettered Streets Press, forthcoming 2019), The Ways of the Monster (KIN(D) Texts and Projects/The Operating System, 2018), Crybaby City (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), Chelate (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016) and Telephone (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013). He was a finalist for the 2017 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. Find him online at www.jaybesemer.net and on Twitter @divinetailor.
Julia Forrest is a Brooklyn based artist. She works strictly in film and prints in a darkroom she built within her apartment. Her own art has always been her top priority in life and in this digital world, she will continue to work with old processing. Anything can simply be done in photoshop, she prefers to take the camera, a tool of showing reality, and experiment with what she can do in front of the lens. Julia is currently working as a teaching artist at the Brooklyn Museum, Medgar Evers College, USDAN Art Center and Lehigh University. As an instructor, she thinks it is important to understand that a person can constantly stretch and push the boundaries of their ideas with whatever medium of art they choose. Her goal is for her audience to not only enjoy learning about photography, but to see the world in an entirely new way and continue to develop a future interest in the arts. You can find her at her WEBSITE and on instagram: @Juliajuliaajuliaa
