Below is Geramee Hensley’s #RemixReallySystem piece, based on this stack of fine words from ReallySystem 1-5.
The Island & how we pray to be known
What a sight! The cellophane plane crashed like a swoon of systems failure.
What an impatient way to fall.
This half-formed beach has corvids instead of sand. On the edge of the gulf we scoop grammar into buckets.
Somebody says “we need to obtain a name” for the rhyme and sake of it. All these waves of syntax and not a single name.
Looking, we take torches into the forest. Instead of trees, fifty-year-old memories larger than death.
In this aura of negotiable intent, we tire. Tongues fumble for words to obviate our mouths of this hot silence.
Geramee’s process note: The first word on my list was plane. I immediately thought of Lost. I went from there. I knew that I wanted to include every single word and make this as short as possible. I also used all the words in their original form. I didn’t want to do any kind of conjugation/pluralization and wanted to use the words as is. I enjoyed the challenge of trying to take this list of words and get them all into something relatively short and tight.
Geramee Hensley’s poem November is an anagram for fishhook appeared in Issue Five. He is from Cleveland, Ohio. He attends Capital University where has taught a portion of a creative writing class. He is the Co-Editor-in-Chief for the student literary magazine, ReCap and Managing Editor for the student newspaper, The Chimes. His work has been featured in Souvenir Lit Journal, Melancholy Hyperbole, The Harpoon Review, and is forthcoming in JAB.