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# One Poem by Corina Copp
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/one-poem-by-corina-copp/
- Published: 2018-05-23T10:55:09.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:25:07.000Z
- Description: Our poetry editor, Wendy Xu, has selected one poem by Corina Copp for her monthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.
- Author: Wendy Xu
- Tags: Poetry, Hyperallergic Poetry, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-18 14:37 (2018)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/05/10106179104_62ebb85caf_o.jpg)

Tauba Auerbach (image via Heidi Di Vries on Flickr)

## Z Helix

*A mutual understanding that they would not resume*

Lacking mirror symmetry  
Each woman had constructed in her own time  
reasons to justify its inevitable, unavoidable, fact  
of moving (other than Eddie Fisher)  
into the past. The past, at times, and  
what if the stone wall were  
for them both, had been, as marks a rare type  
of close friendship—  
*badly natural.* That any continuation  
of the friendship would trample doubly on this badly beloved  
time, then, is reason/rubble enough.

Reason, seeing as you read. Let the moments now pass  
your mind indestructible.  
For we’d desrv’d more.  
More in a series as if your pity bent to belief

Abnormalities of saccades:  
Both women had (self-)destructive  
tendencies themselves—alongside of which generally  
comes (self-)improvement  
at almost all cost (if it is not good for you, it has to go)—  
and messy, tricky, sad pasts of their own before they first met  
and said to one another, breathlessly, Where have you been?  
And almost depthless compassion for mistake  
Often standing outside their spiral bodies  
as they made  
mistakes to watch  
ice floes separate as rear defroster began to work  
finally, Sun  
cast to a hole in the ground aside begging for it. Almost  
depthless capacity to accumulate regret. A side note,  
I’ll have some wet fibres of our being  
better with which to speak in whistle register  
 Elizabeth Grosz  
says art is  
autonomous sensation, and I buy it  
Where self and world unfold simultaneously  
for the sensing subject, cradling  
In step are two hunters in general

sufficiently remote from hurt or inroad  
Almost depthless is a way to say we all  
have our limits, no? I don’t buy  
it / want / not / them, whee  
That guy says The impotence of whiteness  
is the cause of the spread  
of facism: for a (rich) white audience, integer  
lone in my checking, diffident (as Bad). Sum sad  
Who’s Berardi? Sum sad, Berardi,  
*rlly*? Sum sad I am impotent, I am  
Literature, missing Ha, thumb sculpted  
the point  
of origin: hair-bun. When time passes over more urgent scents  
of betrayal,  
abandonment, chaos, confusion in a scene of love  
the senses (can be) cemented.  
It is better in the end to work less,  
refuse confusion of persons in a scene of love  
Working less is not only possible  
but, achoo, necessary—  
to let each other go  
and have (some) peace, as if, well—bless her  
And you, moreover, build some disentangled respect  
and political will in a scene of love which will lead  
to easy rhetoric, easy now—hair burns in an  
animated still overlaid  
with a soundtrack of speaking in an  
A-flat-octave-6 hush over putrid fen. Psychic ability  
too for both women will serve them well as spies  
in World War 5, Glass-

blowing…  
THE INVENTION OF, coincided with the establishment  
of Roman Empire 1st Cent. BC. Birdcages an  
inspiration for the vertical  
construction of prison bars.  
So there I am a child, asleep on a small, brown  
beloved-past couch, in its fibers, multi-colored  
shards of glass. Careful to rest my arms  
on cushions beneath  
my head, not to scrape downward in sleep  
For I will get cut  
While my mom I saw standing before the furnace,  
a few yards  
into the barn,  
twirling her blowpipe, midnight.  
A ball of amber light at its end. She presses it flat  
on the steel marver,  
moves to rest and turn in wet wood. Rounds again.  
Orb of amber hisses  
And steaming, over and over

…crashes extravagantly into itself now, glass  
of Tauba Auerbach’s double-helix shattered after  
A man (not-)got in the end  
knocks it off the gallery flat with a careless swing  
of his hand when he goes to hug  
an old friend  
of his X partner whose blonde  
hair shines in contrast to  
HER BLACK CAP, now refracted in fine threads  
of sculpture strewn across the cement floor  
AS BLUE LIGHT  
and when she turns another way, to introduce  
her boyfriend (all of whom tower over you), carcerant blue light  
cast at a certain plant, moves into a verb.  
An oblique form of the verb *carcerare*, meaning  
to imprison.  
Had been cared for, now staring at steak  
as if rare. You’re a rare canard, you steak  
in a cage, opal hues  
in long shadow on the lawn  
who cares, for darkness  
about to pass—  
*Sounds trivial?* Someone carpeted  
theater space for their dance piece  
and I thought, Now that’s a good idea. Noticed  
as he opened the door  
she went through,  
and she came back. And she went on in—  
phone’s you.  
Knock on it glass  
 *Goodbye, or, good* 
*cot.* 
  
*I cherish my cotton underwear* 
*I will not go back to wool* 
*I will wear my cotton underwater* 
*I will wash my dead with ZOOM* 
  
or drool, stretches art. Can’t decide dot dot.

\* \* \*

Corina Copp is a writer and poet based in New York.