Un/Occam’s Razor: In Praise of You, Dear Complex
Felicia Zamora
Cut away
(extraneous material)
unceremonious
* philosopher * theologian *
un/known fuzzy logic
un/known phenomena
un/known quantities: a rule
espouses complex theories
A rule: logic of un/
Poetry
2 September, 2023
to butcher [what we know
of knives, sharp blades
in the back—a whittled down]
*INSERT WHITE SUPREMACY. INSERT COLONIALISM*
[amygdala—careful now, don’t slice
incisor before the chomp]
we un/butcher at the shin, torso, elbow, thalamus, cornea
to un/heap a pound of flesh; whose flesh? [Our flesh.]
[Complex, variations of all you endure in un/
pleasurable
equal
tolerable
holy
realistic
fathomable
answerable
fettered
fallible
derstudy
knowable
seen
derstood
tied
doing
] ] ]
] ] .]
Let us hold space for [ ] [our bodies not transparent]
[ ] [ ] [ ]
[ ] [ ] [ .]] Water in/is wave [transform].
The way imagine says field & you run
barefoot into brambles, over hedges, palms
of thorns, heels of honeysuckles, nipples
bulbs bruit in soil & salient in air—a body
What worth to be metaphysical hums of an earth
older than our un/possibilities sings. Complex, you stretch
your sharpened bones, cilia, tendons to unleash un/[ ]
unsimple. We unsimple. Body unsimple
note: First, left-side stanza is language erasure from Merriam-Webster's online dictionary. Felicia Zamora is the author of six poetry collections including I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the 2022 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. She’s received fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Ragdale Foundation, and Tin House. She won the 2022 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from The Georgia Review and the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International. Her poems appear in Best American Poetry 2022, Boston Review, Guernica, Orion, The Nation, Poetry, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for Colorado Review.