Aiden Lion Lund

Every impression lives in a room, and the womb is room one. That’s where the subconscious begins, back when the embryo didn’t think but felt . Impressions waved upon the embryo, upon the embryo of you. You sensed back then, back when all the senses formed and when the coalescent impressions took shape and all those memories collected in that room, the womb where it all began. In the womb we sensed near weightlessness and full weightlessness in sleep, in amnion. The warmth of another person’s body bore through to bear ourselves just for a little while, just until we could float on the merits of our own senses, in the beginning, in room one with all our senses, or feelings, as witness to the birth. – The world becomes the second room, and that becomes the conscious mind, in force of gravity at its fullest feel. These two rooms divide into smaller and smaller rooms within the big two. Fractalline. The birth canal mimics the vagus nerve, connecting the two, or vice versa. The trunk between...

As seen in the journal Alternate Route , Issue 13, Spring 2024 Some poets pull from the minutiae of daily life. Other poets pull from their guts, seeking a pairing in the outside world – trying for a conduit between microbiome and biome, between enteric mind and visible matter.  The truth is there's plenty of bad poetry passed as good poetry. Bad poetry is all or mostly in the conscious, while good poetry is rooted in the subconscious. Good poetry is plentiful but it can also frustrate when it allows the subconscious to rise only for the conscious to tamp it back down with the fury of a scholar who must translate fecundity into a solo language – table for one. Then there’s the poetry neither good nor bad in which the subconscious mind spins and reigns with libertine license – a grin turned sideways and used in place of the letter C. The best poetry, however, fuses the conscious and subconscious in a balanced flow of geometry and spindrift from flexed muscle. It is the subconscious ...