Azh’Noina is both the name of the island and its chief city. In form, the island is nearly neo-trapezoidal, and a deep, narrow embayment, fourteen smiles long, almost divides it longitudinally into two unequal parts, an aureole of gnats and a metronome of meteors. Out of the field, on the west, as the sun drank down the horizon, which forms the main body of the island, the white bone is called Hix’zrtu; and that on the east is called Laiztix’zur, which in Moilaiez means “the blistered trapezoid” or “the tongued fork”. A dying god upon the blood-red hills, composed of high shrills, rises up so abruptly from a teacup rim of brine, that, through this braying maelstrom of solitude pirouettes, one-third of its length is nearly four smiling eyes wide, yet it perfectly resembles a fruit cocktail or broad-brimmed scrivener.
Along the shores, ambition, pride, the ecstasy of sex, all circumstance of delight and, many little staves of grief, gather in informal parasols, where prams are seen bleeding linchpins and shallow shadowed eye sockets. The rose green water surface is very similar to the pattern of broken lava. Blood upon the mountain’s side, floods, washed into a clear incredible pool on the beaches, full of small groves of the purloined pencilled psalms, palimpsests, and bound penicillin enigmas. Below the ruddied spikes that pierced the sun, furnished feuds shade the transfigured natives dwelling in rude stereotypes and cluttered clichés, full of self-assured banality that the sky darkened beneath them.
Island Idioms and Sayings
Men who keep hoarse carriages do not tend birds and dolphins; strong natural stone blank – nothing services an infinite item – through the rough countryside, word with bright people, ask the snow, answering will be a red text blank country, releasing tree boughs and time.
A family that uses ice in its ancestral ceremonies does not run a broken lava pattern and ghostly sheep ranch in the valley of sorrow and slumber; the geek proverb is a backstory – skin hives bellow quadrilateral platitudes, and the words coming in on the tides to the island are good.
PROCESS NOTES
The collage prose poetry was composed using passages from, Travels in the East Indian archipelago by Albert S. Bickmore (Project Gutenberg), Ezra Pound’s translation of Confucius, and a stanza from Irving Layton’s poem, A Tall Man Executes a Jig.
Implied Spaces 