Zoe Darsee

9 poems

Zoe Darsee was born around noon on a Tuesday. They are the author of BELL LOGIC (Spiral Editions) and Anzündkind (Creative Writing Department). Their collaboration with Elise Houcek, a lysergic neo-noir poet's novel, is forthcoming in 2025 from Inside the Castle. Together with Nadia Marcus, they run TABLOID Press. This work continues.

Gate

Imagine the results of locking up, without, for an instant, speaking of it, of 
stop, gates, as energetic loss funding the 
displacement of crows like arterial 
economies, but 
instead imagine she comes here
for pecks, loves, twigs, inorganic matters, to be very good 
at burials, to be very bad again until she is good. Initiatives of air 
like bandages invert nests into the sound of the police,
really clopping now into the distance

She watches herself go blank

but everything she is is negative ease. She cuts leaves into eggs
or windows and this way she doesn’t exist, just the labor of maintaining. But she is
additionally modified by the movement of her hands blurred
in the rejection of a statue’s
gaze. She exists; it’s not personal, she’s passing as a person
and only her hands move, she’s trained— for instance, as a boy
who in digitalizing suddenly vanishes. That is to say
she often rejects visitors, like the statues, too.
But you want to say something,  you do 

As she kissed the broken nose,

“That would be the man I choose,” and discussed this
with herself, as if on a podium, on the topic of sex in public. 
And she lipped at the negative crowd, “As a statue who will 
but can’t, in the heat of the moment, reject the warm hand
I offer— My breasts 
move, as if without control, up to eye level
working themselves into the marble
where holes and chips make this engagement
free. Like you saw,” 
she said,  “I wormed
my nipples into his mouth, which was open
as though someone had prepared him

Weren’t you also there

“You also,” the guide would admit.
"You also 
would readily jump
on a statue to flatten its nose off. Already
warming the stone,” admits the guide, “and 
accordingly, the thing you really want of it
would embolden you to die, that is
of kissing, the cold. But, though I agree 
with your desire and how strongly it compels you 
to make a merger of labor, it’s not your career
encamping the shadow 
of a time marker. Later, you 
would realize that the walled soul 
inside you strangely also rises 
out of you desiring sleep, out of shuddering 
you, you

Girl

“While pressing you down and into the core, the earth inserts its worms, see.”
Her eyes are open when the guide pinches out of her hand
the match and crows descend
as when the sun passes behind a cloud, crowd
moves into a clearing
and there's laughter. In a dream, the radio of her uvula buzzes
while she is sleeping, like a crow or dolphin

She can barely take it,

whereas the woman opens her legs in pleasure
at the movement of the statues, when silencing about 
(she knew to move) without becoming hard. That is, she wants
herself (under review) to be hard as a painted man and at once, the 
way the stoic performer, for instance, stays 
in the empty street for one observer
as though he were the dog of a child waiting 
for a command. No; isn’t she bonded to making product 
out of vibrant energy, something posterity
will eat?  Unconditionally, she practices 
stillness to the exclusion of that former life

And she crouches in position (meanwhile, eyeing

the guides and visitors) beneath the hedges where the legs appeared
to copulate; it was diving with crows. Alongside her  
the distance of preparation is where the informants paused. “But
boys want, too, to stay,” she rolls, whistling from the dell to 
their ankles. Just the ankles
answer affirmatively by cracking

Boy,

who vanished one tour earlier 
under no circumstance having known her, she practiced 
throwing sounds the very night after she was training her eyes not to blink
would often say she didn’t seem to speak
and instead cracked the way her hands did in the air. Having
vanished from my town because I knew someone
I, too practiced throwing sounds that were common to me

Additionally,

Before I removed, place by place, additionally
and when she speaks as though time “reduced
itself to the garden,” since in shadows, it dials and bends
in shape, I remained 
intact— I knew my name, I gave her that