“CAMP” from DAUGHTERGOD

Poetry by:
LOUISE AKERS

    1. Discretio spiritum:

it begins in air

vast air gold
air air
destitute of
light gold ending
like a sound and color
ripped through
air how I
grow arro
gant and swaggering
through gold and empty
invocations ad mea
perpetuum deducite
tempora
carmen






    2. “Who am I? the Fawn
of God?”






    3. I enter her somatic camp
a saint, and I’m looking for trouble,
asking for it. Every camp
we made that summer she, JOAN, soma, raged and endlessly we
anticipated our syncopation,
her parousia.






    4. Camp: synced, stinking, and choleric...
    Let’s get outta here! I said, JOAN, it’s perfectly possible
to enjoy something “ethically injurious...” Anyway, we’re in circulation with God; punishment and edifying sermons give way to reward and sexual emancipation. Now we are promised freedom
and promises of freedom.

    And JOAN, in characteristically
inexorable purpose—the explosion of a lone water molecule—strikes, accuses me of lesbianism
and molesting her political
nursery. Jumps out of the moving car: somatic re-feminization.

JOAN! I call out,
your dreams are full of cells.

Camp, as if her amnion, as if the trouble we’re looking for constructs our bodies, tectonically.
Not hyperconsciousness, but ice cubes for water, the reopening of museums post-plague.

JOAN d’arc: the Biodrag Dimension, Radical Pragmatism, Synced (with me) and Clean as Camp Allows, Circulating God and Emancipating Michael, Looking for Trouble, Begging for War,
NEVER HAD NO MANDRAGORA!!!
Oh, Anglophiiiiile:
You have her ring!

JOAN, skywalker, cisMaid oversold
to justice, the Daughtergod—she
missed the stink even
forty times her sword.






    5. JOAN, blonde like emmer,
like tact to polish catholic
reports. A thought event—a war event—is won
by shadowed order; emmer growing golden
over brick,
glass,
over our soft, squishy
corner.






    6. JOAN’s “visits” are as revelatory as they’re
apprehensive, even a little
pornographic
for their transformation
of the private into the
spectacular, resisting
paraphrase through easy
opposition: one side:
apophasis of a ‘gender,’ the other: the gala of faith,

the final sync: ‘Theophany in Drag.’

Congratulations, JOAN, haec sancta!
Your wig’s cut short,
dazzling
while our scalps grow raw.






    7. And what is a man,
looking the other way? Metaphysics? Certainly not
litigiousness. An admission
that god is in the body he
won’t look at?
Or, is that that JOAN was right? The dove was right? The fawn of god had never
faltered!






    8. If a human man, looking away, with metaphysical intent, not smelling certain blood not
    syncing not looking in the right
direction
blinks,
does that prove the Daughtergod’s
privacy is sacred?

An oriole, a spy, the hailing of the superhuman, JOAN, Brad Pitt of Byzantium, the songfast
pennant, oracular Bloom.

She presses that word we’re folded from
into the grooves, the angel, sister to/of
breath.






    9. As a Saint, I am the daughter of genitives,
the crucifixion of accusatives, the abolition of the nominatives.
My offer is dative.

As a Saint, I am fake science. I am the decreation of enlightenment; I am its silly
convolutions.

As a Saint, I am in the business of good explanations, beautiful ones that make sounds like an
enlightened understanding
of real grace.

As a Saint, I am loyal.
I wish to make war. I am a prince, am humble and make no more war.

As a Saint, so much is at stake, and the consequence of waging war is to wage a war against
us.

As a Saint, the risk of waging war is spending it
without you.

As a Saint, no matter how many men you raise against us.

As a Saint, I love the insect, its larvae, as I love myself, my skinny dogs.

As a Saint, I had not wanted to besiege the town, I had not intended any canonballs to remove
any fucking faces.

As a Saint.






    10. As a Saint, I was the nominative, the accusative, the vocative. I determined spirits as
    genitives, I required datives, stunk with ablatives.

As a Saint, I wonder if you understand urgency:
JOAN, flame, self-touching
urgency, golden/
gold alike.