Isabel Sobral Campos
Sobriety Crystal
To simply say: “the crystal is a window” and someone asks “which window”
and you point to the left, “that one, the only one”
To simply say: “at night when it is intolerable” and someone asks “what is
intolerable?” but explaining is expiation
To simply state: “twelve steps” or “cold turkey” and then biting your tongue
To simply say: “vigil” “night watch” and then guzzling a glass of water (the
fizzy kind)
To simply say: “I sit and watch the dark” with feelers, the swollen yellow
hands, nails of mud, the face unwatchable
To simply say: “a condiment” “peppery night” knowing the eyes burn while
staring
To simply say: “watchfulness gags” knowing gagging is survival
To simply say: “observation is key” but the window keeps blowing open, the
stream of sound keeps flooding in
To simply say: “it appears I slashed where mirror & reflection meet”
come, the posture
folded legs bowing throat in
. . .
white on white
window
dot
shadow looks outside the broadcasted
shellacked dark
absence of sleep
. . .
the black square cadence
backwater
window
-seeing
doubly
equilibration
. . .
float
beam
cool forehead wrinkling
despondent, alone,
expect mood to soften
it
bubbles up
from within
soul grasp
. . .
no sleep
vigil
wash feet soles white
with moonlight
shadow a peak
painted interior
slow debris collecting colluvial glow
of night
sleep with open eye
lidden
, roused dream
. . .
the corners of the black square keep me still
in the granular awakening
rewiring pattern
. . .
when I could exist
immersed (without forethought
repetition, without
. . .
white window
on white night
black moonlight
trigonometry
confluence of returning
thought
. . .
sleepless like fog-
horn,
bullet night burn
-ing city
my window owns my
shadow
. . .
come
through wakefulness which iterates a veil
sore,
the insufficient night cannot contain entirely
my hours
of looking
‘parsed between measurement’
back on the glass
. . .
clinamen lasso
I am opening to negation
to the watchful descent of a drop from the inside
outside
a dimension,
unexpressed
the time it takes for me to sit
accumulated
a coalmine in each eye
. . .
midnight inexplicable
erosion unseen glass, come
strip the eye of presence the dog wallowing
hoisted inside the dog bark to
the heart
alert with
inch of will dragged on
. . .
night I do not know I subsist
while being exterminated
when I could exist like
a fume exist
in the dispossession
. . .
I am toward
pacifist
I nod turn hell blooms like a foot on
a splinter
a squish on dead meat
I am toward I move
in the motion the slip of grease
a comet in trust
I have never turned back regressed
toward,
come
. . .
when staring at the void the constant
inconstancy emerges the distinction as seeing
or making?
the distinction as a kind of mindful diction
of usage
. . .
the void is braided & calculated
a star plaids
where the nothing is
. . .
,
notice
tubular way of looking out so repressed
so
unprepared someone tells me “I’m a coward
for not wanting to die” for this cause
for dying for
for fearing the need to die
I hear the explosion within me
who tries slowly to subdue
the wiring, the reduction to
want, appetite
but what other dominions exist?
come,
what controls are set, established
in ?
. . .
this crystal is in memoriam as potential
as what transforms enlaced from form to
otherness
as being other than one
self
. . .
constructed from the tailbone
from the bottom’s radiance
sacrosanct
a scab
that is pendant too
. . .
cling that motion that sticks
upon ipseity the observation
from detachment which is at times
a bellicose attempt at holding the self
open
turbulent
exposed
to a parchment
. . .
a trace of guilt
historical
is also in it in momentous
turn
toward
. . .
window wasp
twirling in dusk
has small blood in it
Sobriety Crystal
. . .
Is it simple
to look
at one’s looking
through impasse then within
a mind’s enclosure to sum
. . .
The juniper
lost of the tree
also a place without terminus
riveted in the jolt
come guarded
, in the speech
. . .
with so much that has been detected
within the giving in of giving out within
a waiting housed
in braille drippings
so much for the looking into the empty house
with dustbins
splayed like mountains
I fall a bit
deeper
. . .
as when I come to the window
arriving in a blank
the morning comes, moves through my staying
when a wall moves
I feel it
as yearned impassable
a message exists
in this light
. . .
Lower the tunnels
over there appraise the fence with the nether cork
spark
. . .
It’s a balloon & a bubble
I turn to
The bubble floats me away
into a float shimmer not unlike certain codes
for
hell
enistic
no hell may travel here a soft swerve internal
motion that shows
. . .
For turning
in it the crystal appears
in telling the crystal prophetic
What
it says chars
in the saying the crystal leaps mushrooming
in the
white trepidation of rain ?
“It is raining”
“It is not raining”
Isabel Sobral Campos' books are Your Person Doesn’t Belong to You
(Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2018), How to Make Words of Rubble (Blue
Figure Press, 2020), and the chapbooks Material (No, Dear and Small
Anchor Press, 2015), You Will Be Made of Stone (dancing girl press,
2018), and Autobiographical Ecology (above/ground press, 2018). She
is also the co-founder of Sputnik & Fizzle.