Excerpt from SEAS
During my possession I’ve had amazing hair, we’re both out of control:
throwing flames and furniture, a chair bounces against a tree: it’s fall.
Everything I touch turns to neon, the demon checks its email on my phone
We learn possession the way we learn gender, it’s part of our make-up: after I
saw the devil in the mirror in the girl’s bathroom, I had to review my stance
on evil: the girl who looks like me / is afraid of reading unsupervised / the
girl who looks like me / doesn’t think that god likes her music
We touch in close lightning. we love by a fierce perimeter
we speak with the accent of our hands
or our gestures move in a tongue figured as fire
Just reading about the flame of a candle gives me a possession
This is my genius: an abolition of time
This is me pre-individual
Did this possession swoop into me or did I uncover it by some inadvertent
archaeology: did I move the couch and the ghost flew out
Possession is the ghost of devout ecstasy, the shadow side of this dialectic:
this epileptic: what happens when your guest has no name
A twin is a ghost who is right there: you are the guest of the ghost: a
mathematical necessity, that a point will have an inverted double on the
surface of a sphere: in a typical neural reversal, a possession is a mirror
spinning
I want to come home, back from the dead / I want to read guides written by
others: she washes up close to me / she has my face / floating like an apple:
she says that I can build a city on the water / and she has a little journal: we
touch in close lightning, contracted in a blue shock at the fingertip
She looks at me: a revelation
Midway through my possession I take up meditation: when I can’t change the
condition of my thoughts, I can change the power of my feelings. We are
dysregulated / the host takes a deep breath. She guides me through her inside
Her skin slips, a latex over an airlock: slick, imprecise, this is why she takes on many forms
The host holds her arms out to me, maternal: the guest curls up into her new machine
The filmy cloud forms a nest around my heart
Somewhere in me a light turns on and the film of my heart sheens:
somewhere in me an egg opens / around my face an egg / the dust is a
flickering snow. My host is warm and safe, I am compelled to burrow down.
I am compelled to flex and convulse beautifully, familiarizing myself with the
controls / with this new material, its contours, where it gives, where it
constricts: to announce my presence: I walk through the host, she shimmers
around me, the host clings to me, her film sticks in my mouth, it slides, wet,
down my back
I cling to the veil
by writing this possession i am laying silk over a tree, it’s a general outline, a
soft container
My body extends, like a ray or tree: I have a starting point and no end: this
image has no physics, it’s impossible
I am the author of my own nightmares, an animal working in the dark / my
vision plunges, an arrow sharp at both ends
Sometimes I hear music from the floor
and it’s all in separate teeth
like opening a beautiful comb
Elle Longpre is a musician and author of the book How to Keep You Alive (CCM 2017), as well as five chapbooks of poetry, prose, and image. Her work has been anthologized, translated into French, and has appeared in APARTMENT, jubilat, la vague, blush lit, Deluge, the Volta, elimae, and other publications. They earned their PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Denver, and can be found in the woods.
