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Nelly Sanchez is a French collagiste inspired by Surrealism and Futurism. Her universe is a feminine one—sensual, colored, mysterious, sometimes funny,and often disturbing. Her main themes are the female condition and the relationship between man and woman. Her collages complement her writings on novels by French women. Her artwork and resume can be found at www.nellysanchez.fr
2019 has been a year of reckoning—from inquiries in D.C., to staggering statistics on the effects of climate change. Our wealth of data and far-reaching media platforms allow us to list facts and share images in real-time.
In an increasingly codified world, the effects of our words and actions are often presented to us rapidly, perhaps even intrusively. How can the poet compete with the rapid-fire sign and signifier—the canned experience, the summary, the streaming footage?
In, And: Phenomenology of the End, Franco “Bifo” Berardi writes, “. . . poetry is precisely the excessiveness beyond the limits of language, which are the limits of the world.” As we enter a new year, with promises of further digital abstraction, let us look to the poetry that continues to push boundaries—that places us beyond the evidential to the sensorial—the beginning and the end of our human experience.
- C.M.
April of 2000, the first thing that quote happened
in this time period I'm reflecting . . . upon? or as
the poet says, being reflected upon.
The agency for thought requires does it inter-
action with the unseen is think-
ing taught does it start and stop Do I think a dream?
One thing we did while he was so ill
was trance work together, lying in bed when
he wasn't in hospital — I was using trance to
write Benediction And we would say what the vision
was together each contributing its details a dwelling
at night with a lamp e.g. Or there was a field of folk he said
And would see it, both of us, as real. As:
“these were people in a field. there was a rose petal on
each's forehead but it was later a ruby towards the
end of the vision. first we'd entered and stood in a cave . . .”
And I saw the parts he put in and he saw what I put —
we were treating his pain and trying to — be
together in experience which became as real as
a dream dreamed is, dream as real as life with-
out time. Where does thought come from in you?
Alice Notley is a celebrated poet and the author of over 40 books of poetry. She lives in Paris.
Kinsey Cantrell is a Brooklyn-based poet, a volunteer for The VIDA Review, and a poetry and mixed media reader for Bomb Cyclone. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Nat. Brut, Anomaly, Datableed, New Delta Review, and elsewhere.
Nance Van Winckel's fifth book of fiction is Ever Yrs., a novel in the form of a scrapbook (2014, Twisted Road Publications); her eighth book of poems is Our Foreigner (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series). A book of visual poetry entitled Book of No Ledgeappeared in 2016 with Pleiades Press. The recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner, she has new poems in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Field, Poetry Northwest, and Gettysburg Review. She is on the MFA faculties of Vermont College of Fine Arts and E. Washington University's Inland Northwest Center for Writers.
When you turn four, Preston, you will be as old as the sun and the earth and as old as Heaven. In the kitchen, I am lying on a rug next to the sliding glass door. I am holding a rabbit against my chest and one arm is behind my head. The words inside are a voice. You spoke of this one thing that is freedom.
Preston, when you turn four, you will see a sphere rising from the front courtyard, as you are awake in the room which was your father’s, and first was mine, where my sister too slept in her crib. The sphere will rise with its light in every direction. The ferns will each one come into its shadow, and the palm frond will become a mouth. The angel will be the whale’s middle. Its belly will go out the front gate. It will open and close the gate quietly. The key is to be thinking of these things at the same time.
What is felt in this room is God’s mother.
When you are four, the light will begin in the cement and travel up the stucco wall. Some of the light is violet. Some of it blue. Some of it is yellow. There are no ghosts.
Look Preston, the cloud is coming down in the form of frost. It is like a sponge. When the moment comes, I want you to go as quietly as you can. Get to the fountain at the edge of the west loop, to the bridge which goes across the loop and into the plaza. You used to play there. Go into the little movie theatre. Get to a row in the middle and lay on the floor. If you are small enough, pull your knees all the way beneath the seat, go as far down as you can.
From the whale’s belly is also a light that is green. To breathe you need only shut your eyes.
The sun is rising. The wetlands have burned. The water has
burned. The doves which made their nest in the entryway, there did the shore begin its exchange.
You can see through the courtyard into the family’s home. If you stand very still with your hands empty, there is the feeling.
Preston, when you turn four, we are going to go on an airplane, all of us together. You will sit in
the window seat and the sky and even mountains will be beneath you. You will be in the clouds.
Remember those clouds.
Preston, you will find yourself in Mr. MGregor’s garden. He will come at you with a shovel and a spade, he will come at you with the sound and smell of diamonds, he will remind you of a neighbor, but this man will have gone too far inside his house, so that his pain comes out a star.
Keep the scent of mud in your nose and in your belly. This will make you invisible to the men who cannot read sky. If you become thirsty, think of a time-scale. If you are hungry think of the door. Remember to look up. You know the way. Remember, everything is a circle.
To be rooted and unrooted as a tidepool, to spread into the world.
Dear God,
Desert Inn is opening a hole into you. A bird is hollering from a man’s shoulder, as the man is making his way around the earth. The bird sounds like a white macaw. Across the pool, there is a black cat on the wall, ascending the stairs to your apartment and lying around on your bed and beneath your desk, a big fly coming in through the window, the sun rising.
Everyone is going someplace.
Remember the olive tree which sang these songs, dressed as a noble savage wreath. Remember the blades of grass reflected the moon and those lights, another cat inside, slapping its tail.
Dear God,
The horses seem to have switched in advance of the switchboard—the ground is not what you thought!
Dear God,
nearness has come for you at last.
Look at that, someone said, the hole is becoming wide. The ground is opening like a bowl. Into the bowl goes the rubber tree, and the air. In goes a yellow ball.
In goes the world’s largest crystal sphere. God has become so dense, and he is sitting up in the
back room.
Dear God,
First put the stone on your head. Open your hands and face, palms up. Now move the light around
around
around
Do you feel it through the air?
Dear God,
I am in the white shell.
Dear God,
The shell goes all the way to Ellis Island, and once you get there the island will have become a woman’s breast; there will the oceans give way to forest, and there will words give way to sound and finally voice, and will the pain become a blanket, will it become an hourglass pulling, its sand become crystal, its mind become crystal, the web getting its rocks off with the windows shut, the frontier exploding.
Above the children’s table, so many jars of curry. The children were dead leaves blowing across the cement. No running! The boys would shout at them, No running in the pool! But the children were dead leaves and all they could do was run. And when they finally ended up in the pool they would float for a while and then they would sink down to the bottom, becoming the sound of the gate spread around like an electric fence.
The operators watched the hole grow open for one hour, and then IT became them. It took their eyes and their batons and used them to open itself faster, so that everything around went inside. In went the dead animals. Their blood and skin became the wind.
We’re losing the animals, someone said.
In went the black cat, and the stones stacked outside.
Language became the opening with the rest of them. It became the feeling in your hands when the stone is on your head and your hands are a bowl. An echo around the rim.
Outside, you think you see an animal, like a beaver or a raccoon, but you don’t see any tail and it seems to be running upwards on its hind feet. It reminds you of a sloth or a wild hog. The animal is running from beneath Manhattan, and it runs across the interstate and disappears behind a row of restaurants, but to you it looks like the animal runs into the window of a saloon; you see it run across the tables, and vanish into the far wall.
Shannon Salter lives in Las Vegas, where she received her MFA from UNLV. Her poems and stories have appeared in journals such as The Bitter Oleander and Denver Quarterly. Her great love is the Mojave Desert.
When I drove through my home it was an orange
Ford lit bricks in the grass, littered it, my house
In the plants. When I drove through my home
I didn’t expect it so small. I crashed a gathering
All my friends attended, but I didn’t sustain any
injuries then and walked around, snacked and took
In pictures of me on one wall, a watercolor of a ship
Ashore beside them. I didn’t paint it. I didn’t
Sustain any injuries then, or in the moments
After when like anyone I listened for my name
In conversation. It was later than I imagined it’d be
Later than noon, and the scrims on the windows
Disturbed, but not much odd, and not much said
When I drove into my home. I drove through it.
Like religion
Or good TV
You command of me
Orthodox tokens of
I love you so much
I want to buy you
A makeup bag
And get in it with you
And rattle in excess pink
And nude powder pink
And nude as the day is
Among the tools
Along the bottom
I want to stay on the shelf of your life
Or by your mirror ten or fifteen
Years and lose my color
To your handling pink
Orange, green, and purple flowers
Pale from light and frequent use
Or get in it with you, and in there cover
And uncover our same and
Different skins
At a pace at all
Times we each
Agree’s comfortable
And safe in the face of
How I count them
Our four zippered walls
In the back of the cab we collaborated on your new family
History, paring to the pit the moment it began to write itself
Around the table, almost right after it happened. Clearly
Your stepfather wanted everyone in the restaurant to know this
Family’s his now, the way his arm was yoked over your mother.
Your cousin mentioned her sons, how they could say anything,
Really anything at all they saw online, and we agreed, the mothers
And the younger of us guests from the wedding. It’s one of our brand
New fears. Your uncle at the other end of the table looked up
From the tray of oysters he was splitting with his wife to chime in,
And as she speared one with her tiny fork he said so we could hear it,
Come on, baby, mama bird it, your mouth to mine. Your sister, with her
Sopping fleshy chunks of fish lined up by size on a square white plate
Deflected eyes made her way by the waiter while he wiggled the tip
Of his shucker into the hinge of an East Beach Blonde, and brine
Dripped on his apron and the table. We must be one knife short’s
All she said, to no one in particular, since what else could she say,
And he moved on to dismantling a Sunken Meadow Gem and set
It in its halfshell on the tray filled with ice like the room was
Filled with noise. Levelled it. When we sat down to dinner what I asked
Was for a place as good as any at the table and not can you believe
I’m blinking in this picture that Cassini took today from space?
Tanner Pruitt received his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he taught and was awarded a Maytag Prize for Poetry. A former assistant director of the University of Virginia's Young Writers Workshop, Tanner now lives in San Francisco. His recent poems have been published or are forthcoming in TIMBER, Permafrost, Bennington Review, and Crab Orchard Review.
When Longinus marvels Sappho “seeks to make her mind, body, ears, tongue, eyes, and
complexion...join together in the same moment of experience,” note her mind is on the same
level as her body. Her mind is on the same level as her tongue. Her mind is on the same level as
her eyes. Her mind is on the same level as her ears. Her mind is on the same level as her
complexion. When Kant adds “her philosophy is not to reason but to sense,” note how senseless
to pay her no mind. Not to entrance for the exit, not to pinch the atrophied limb, not to back
from glib protrusion, not to run from mouth white noise, not to pass the stair to lift the self, not to
rail against transference, not to take into account these additions. From the limen to the lintel,
this needs to be discussed (disgust).
Did you come for heirlooms, fearing horses, fearing squid? Did you come for windows, fearing
otters, fearing teens? Did you come for linen, fearing marriage, fearing motion? Did you come
for a basement, fearing handwriting, fearing fog? Did you come for vases, fearing flowers, fearing
looking up? Did you come for cushions, fear fearing metal, fearing weasels? Did you come for
stitches, fearing chickens, fearing garlic? Did you come for a pit, fearing opinions, fearing dust?
In 1830 three men, one of them Coleridge, accompany a woman at the Falls of Clyde.
In 1830 Coleridge and some random gentleman stand near a couple at the Falls of Clyde.
In 1830 Coleridge and a male companion stand near a couple at the Falls of Clyde.
Some time passes before these various men recount the view by describing a “cataract of great height,”
a “summit...which appear[s] to blend with the sky and clouds,” a “shape that suits [our] purpose best.” It’s
“majestic.” “Majestic,” yes. She agrees, “it’s the prettiest thing [she] ever saw.” (Subtle gibes.)
In 1897 painter Jacob More puts the final strokes on “The Falls of Clyde (Corra Linn).” In it you see a
woman fearfully clinging to the gentleman beside her as she observes the falls. The gentleman stands
erect as he puts his finger on it. Two men standing on either side are also struck by the falls, but their
gestures are neutral, unnoteworthy. We can look at two bodies at that moment colliding, one pillaring the
other, bone rigid, flesh imperceptibly moving in varied waves around it. Or we can contrast reactions as
the promulgation of any urban myth.
Did you come from underneath, fearing metal, fearing clocks? Did you come from overcast,
fearing weasels, fearing wind? Did you come from bottom out, fearing narrowness, fearing chins?
Did you come from sideways, fearing opinions, fearing dust? Did you come from divits, fearing
fog, fearing machines? Did you come from downers, fearing empty space, fearing glass? Did you
come from bottoms up, fearing objects at the right of the body? Did you come from degradation,
fearing objects at the left of the body?
Lyotard writes, he has no need for beautiful nature. He’s holed up in a deduced point of his
residency. Meanwhile, her “free, reflective imagination,” is an impermanence created
without prior form or presumed ending. He must [violate, exceed, and exhaust] such
proclivity. For protection, she devotes herself to his forms. There is a “delicious rivalry” of
fertilization. Lyotard says if she doesn’t die “giving birth to the sublime,” she will think she is
dying.
Still, she sees fit with words felt to describe it: fundamental forty here percent scratches cleft
spitting child storm leaves here don dots large clouds verklempt don a largeness an unripe
rump hole the the unripe the nowhere waterstained dot lime claw ear tunnel never as present
here meander plunge pool collapse wait collapse wait for don dot unripe here dots here
transfigure should grip overhang pothole for which sentiment you gape betray openness
funnels a child rodentwine blanket hunger dots child proclaims an unripe lemon garter
above glossy bounce backyard gape here not scrambled catch bled back lead twirling here
callous stop no dot scramble all conception flossed gasping from now on waste polkadot
follicles
Not enough pain? Too few connections for your pleasure?
gives to airy nothing...habitation and a name —Shakespeare
Like loopy ligatures
garnishing an old-fashioned,
quills couldn’t cut it clean
If the grotesk needles the future
are we cursed?
Cyclical time is drained to digits
High and lowball bank on lithium expression
But I like font to stick like burrs;
You walk thru a field and there are consequences
To a habitat of juniper, lemon, and swallow...
-clink- -clink-
To stems with rosy curves—
-clink- -clink-
To reeling in plain habit!
-clink- -clink-
It looks like a seahorse so our memory holds the hippocampus shape. It looks like a ram’s
horn but the seahorse is nonthreatening. There were many things resembling it that didn’t
have a name, so never were committed. Both were falsely mythologized for having a sense
of smell. Both cling to locations to stem the tide. Since forgetting is a defense—the
neuronal circuitry in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex sweep away evidence.
Experience boils down to simple shapes so we are more likely to remember. These shapes
limit us by producing a nod, just as the seahorse’s head only moves up and down. When
memory production is lost, depression follows, depression once said to be a “flaw in love.”
There are two hippocampi, one on either side of the brain, just as seahorses mate for life
and travel in tandem, holding each other’s tails. Memory is needed for happiness and
happiness is needed to make it. Devote yourself to memory or it dictates how you see the
world. There may be damage to that part of the brain, an eclipse or slowing down where
exploration is unreachable, trace pathways at a standstill. “Place fields” created by neuron
firings, indicate spatial knowledge based on prior experience. Does a seahorse know by
shape thalassic hemprichii or branch coral? By experience, halophytic mangrove or red
algae? Sadness may be never finding a meeting place where aesthetics are concerned:
walnuts uneaten dusty on the holiday cracker or ants crashing Corning Ware rooster rows.
False memory forms an association with eight things, say: dot, sledge, pink, tar, filament,
crash, stone, and petal. The patient is held to these neutral fixtures as targets for
forgetting, the lure a shape within which one thrives. We can also locate in the brain where
happiness occurred and plant those happy cells into a depressed part of the brain. So we
can remain to drum old happiness, survive within a constellation of false light, or leave to
make needed memories for happiness. The female seahorse travels back to the much
smaller territory the male inhabits. Call it a memory of closeness, the habit of returning to
the familiar. As in first the seahorse was named, then that part of our brain. So that part
of the brain is a memory.
Jennifer Pilch is the author of Deus Ex Machina, winner of Kelsey Street Press's FIRSTS! contest (2015) judged by Myung Mi Kim, and chapbooks Sequoia Graffiti (Projective Industries), Profil Perdu (Greying Ghost), Bulb-Setting (dancing girl press), and Mother Color (Konundrum Engine Editions). Recent projects include a collection of visual poetry entitled "The Decay of Timber" published by Gravel Projects. Her poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Berkeley Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Fence, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, Summer Stock, Tarpaulin Sky Press, and Western Humanities Review, among others. She edits/curates La Vague Journal, which publishes female writers and artists whose work occupies the space between poetry and visual art.
Like a levitating welcome sign
like rain
like the ice which once
carved these rocks
now painted over
with cement dust
we find our pullulation
at an extraordinarily low
and dry site for the species,
in the always cracking
mirror: unremarkable
but remarkably
alive.
This tree has been
forever these, a relict
of a vanished vegetation
community, a plural
tending, to indicate
as present, near.
In the underbrush,
the If inside of
unforgetting dilates,
about to follow.
The Pleistocene
made a pact. Year
after year, the years
fall backwards into this gully
on a scarred suburban
hillside, where only a single clone
survives. An errant bell
in granite shadow
chimes. A prickly leaf,
waxy, dark and green,
rubs a bit of its afterlife
across my arm. On the highway
in the distance, our vaporous
abandon swirls.
Technically I’m trespassing
on the relatively recent
concept of property
to be here: a disjunct
distribution. We take our names
from what we steal, opposed
to that, coiling. Time
exhales in brittle unison
on this north-facing slope
above Jurupa Valley,
incorporated 2011, formerly
part of Riverside, formerly
Mexican land grant, formerly
the territory of the people
called Gabrieleño
by their colonizers,
formerly formed
by glaciers. To gather
the ghosts of that no longer,
the hummingbird plucks
the air apart from era.
The Jurupa Oak,
an isolated occurrence,
is more than 12,000 years
older than California.
It gives birth to itself
again and again, sending up
new shoots whenever
fire consumes a stem.
Less than a mile away,
what remains of Crestmore Quarry,
last operated by TXI Riverside
Cement. The company knew
that fugitive emissions
from the dust piles were spreading.
The machinery
shaves away the consciousness.
“We always say there’s all this
junk in the air, it comes
from the air, but we never say
where the air comes from.”
For over a hundred years,
the intermittent howling
chewed apart the mountain’s bones,
spitting out capital: limestone,
blue calcite, quartz, and
ambient quantities of hexavalent
chromium, a potent carcinogen.
The plant shut down in 2015.
Quietly, like the snow,
poisonous or otherwise,
that no longer falls here,
the wind, diaphanous
conductor, shakes the branches
but not the individual leaves.
The musicians contort their bodies
around their instruments,
frozen in mid-air,
to make them sing.
The leaves flicker, strum
the sky’s face – polyphonic –
across from where I sift
these wayward syllables.
A rattlesnake wakes
the animal inside me.
I wait until my fear
is covered with leaves,
the dusty eyes that refuse
to close, that survive
by ripening into selves.
Little flecks of pyrite
lodge themselves
in my fingers and I think
maybe this is writing.
A language from underground
brushes up against me,
leaving behind
its dim echoes.
At the bottom of the hill,
the illegal dump:
A partially digested
box spring, a busted copper
doorknob, a birdhouse
where perhaps a bird,
whose name drops
like feathers from its body,
still, at least intermittently,
alongside scattered nails
and rubber hoses,
finds a bit of respite.
And in the direction of town,
the almost identical houses,
crouching, squinting
up at the sun.
I take the doorknob
with me, its metal guts
exposed, the bruise
inflicted by the hammer.
It rattles around in my car
and consciousness. I try
to open the door
it once locked, the errant
seed that sprouted
into what was once
a whole community.
I think of the air
so choked with heat
and thirst and what it means
to survive. Somehow,
we learn to live by the flame
that strips the bark away.
We send out little tendrils
from a brokenness that burns.
References:
May MR, Provance MC, Sanders AC, Ellstrand NC, Ross-Ibarra J (2009) A Pleistocene Clone of
Palmer's Oak Persisting in Southern California. PLoS ONE 4(12): e8346.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0008346
Wilson, Janet. “Living with the white dust from a cement factory,” Los Angeles Times, 16 July 2008.
State of California Department of Justice. “Brown Sues Cement Plant for Hexavalent Chromium Exposure,” 3 July 2008. https://www.oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/brown-sues-cement-plant-hexavalent- chromium-exposure.
A heron landed
in the shallows
of my notebook
as I was trying
to drag a poem
out of the water.
The passengers
were clapping
in relief, in
gratitude, for the
pilot’s skill, for
the familiar hand
of gravity.
I walked into the
forest. I walked
into a net of spun
silences. A soft
geometry
snapped as I
moved through it,
sticking to my
forehead
and my fingers.
A noise
got bent
when I pulled it
from my mouth.
I smoothed it out
and strung it up
with the others,
a wire of not-words
hanging in the air
between
my human body
and my forest body.
The not-words
said nothing
about the forms
that rose up
all around me.
Occasionally
a vowel
would fall
from a branch
and settle
on a not-word.
Occasionally
a consonant
would crawl
out of the ground.
Brent Armendinger’s most recent book is Street Gloss, a hybrid work of site-specific poetry and experimental translation, featuring Argentinian writers Alejandro Méndez, Mercedes Roffé, Fabián Casas, Néstor Perlongher, and Diana Bellessi (The Operating System, 2019). He is also the author of The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying (Noemi Press, 2015), a finalist for the California Book Award in Poetry, and two chapbooks, Undetectable (New Michigan Press) and Archipelago (Noemi Press). Brent teaches creative writing at Pitzer College and lives in Los Angeles. His website is brentarmendinger.com.
We stop to be human among the daises and the violets. The brocades of brogues.
And now the meadow of glowing flowers is talking again. Full of the same wind, cut hair
and cold gossip. This is the one lesson. I select my discipleship.
As a mule. Burn the rumor of a demise of assignments. We stop ‘to bear
the polarity of opposites.’ Not in the machine barn, but in the field of minded grass
where we can feel as well as see. Your father’s voice
is my father’s voice blowing as finely toothed green ash
leaves struck by wind suturing across the tree line. The real and imagined light finds the gaps
like water to empty cistern. So, I said, Sister, I wanted to be one. Narrowly winged.
Not a simile. Not to assimilate One pronoun keeping things whole
by (mis)direction. Ms. which
way is the sky. The words become
paper thin. Thick on my tongue. I lick the dirt. I depart as another. So I can love
more fully. A ghostly love. Now a darkened love. Now there is the emerald
ash borer. Here as there no longer a simple letter apart. My eyes grow.
And now t/here is an emerald in your mind. Highly included, if we permit the truth. The trees
outside stiffen. My neck is vertebrae and muscle. Expected. We are plucked
and set as window dressing. The lights dim as a
round of green roses deepen under
the symbolic weight of June and the hidden light rises
which is also the first light which is also the light in which you drown.
‘words! There will be no other words in the world
But those our children speak.’
—George Oppen
Imagine you are a seed. Little word. Little one. With iris eyes.
Imagine ‘all the trees of the field / clapping their hands.’
Imagine a perpetual present. A perpetual wind.
The sky now threatening
like a question that cuts to the quick.
Reined. Then. Bent back the spring
trees iridescent daylight at a time of day
spun out
through the emboldened leaves
clouds strung overhead dark together drift as into a closet.
Do you want me to specify. Should I. ‘Trust to the genius
of trees.’ I was told to count. You had ten fingers and ten toes. Luck. Or. Blessing. Still.
Frustrated. My work never feels to widen. Never closes.
And yet. You revise me. Little word. Surely as I am
altered in kind. In the speech you make possible. Are you now the frame
through which I see. The dark stained glass emblazoned by excitement
of molecules. In the riverside park
above the cottonwood’s shimmy
a bevy of balloons released by a non-profit group of cancer survivors
scatters. Pick one, say, the red one and think later about ecological disaster
and watch until it becomes a period. A dot. Disappears. What else. Pop.
We predict. We know. We say.
From laws of order. And experience. A constant state of becoming.
Of rainwater. Flooding. Flooded with plastic and the roots of new roots. Go on.
Please.
“Here comes the dreamer.”
What is your power. The power to relate. To suspend. My daughter
begs to be hung upside down. It’s a simple game
we play that has nothing to do with prayer—which of course
now it does—and my daughter says where is the earth. As I help her to leave penguin prints
on the ceiling. We pretend. A great many things. Infinite even. Depending upon. The abstract
is not always a wound. Skinned knee or bloody worse. We imagine gravity has reversed
itself in the house. Which could be taken
to stand for so many accomplishments. Markers even. Stages. Rockets. If we believe.
Events travel onward. On water. En garde. I’ve always thought I was a cave dweller in the severing
sunshine. It’s the fiftieth anniversary,
but time is different at differentiated levels of experience. Is defined
for many purposes. So my daughter scribbles—she can’t letter yet.
Dear Astronauts—we love you—thank you for going to the moon. ‘Goodnight light and the red balloon.’
Recently a friend finished
a memoir
about his child who was born with a medical condition and was not supposed to live
out the year. In darkness. Or in light. He titled the book Death of the Heart: A Journey Toward Life
which he admitted
a bit misleading, though he thought
worth the price in an era of constant quick clicks. Sometimes I wonder, he confessed, if I would have been
able to publish the manuscript if H. had died. And this is the way. ‘This is the way
we satisfy
ourselves with explanations
of the unfollowable world.’ And so. Joseph’s brother sold him for twenty
pieces of silver. What is your intention. Attention. ‘A flowering
focus on a distinct infinity.’ And if I gently place
my palm on your soft head of uncut hair, will you forgive my gift.
The danger of being us in essence. Real
and imagined. Done to and to ourselves. At some level. You do not yet know distinction.
‘Earlier and other creation.’ And you ask, Are
the astronauts going to be at our next family reunion. Talking and pausing at tables rowed out
in the grass fields behind the house in Atchison. By. Not simply
the river. Of stars. The castaway. The sea is in us too. The sea. Of stars. And you say
Let us say—Amen.
Daniel Biegelson is the author of the chapbook Only the Borrowed Light (VERSE) and Director of the Visiting Writers Series at Northwest Missouri State University, as well as an Associate Editor for The Laurel Review. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, FIELD, New Orleans Review, Salt Hill Journal, and Third Coast, among others.
All unmetered talk
of weather goes
small in proportion
to weather, and we,
all talk, go too.
Every day feels like turning
forty, trying to keep
still, not to go,
like the Alapaha River,
to ground.
Above, the power
on off,
it’s noctcaelador,
fiending for acknowledgement
or a slight, anything,
from the parent,
any parent. What else
do you grow
in your garden?
What you see
in someone else’s.
When I permit myself a dwelling
in spring, the air
phase-shifts
elsewhere, the bird
(I have names
for a few now)
makes invisible
choices, and I don’t need
to make shit up
to get a poem going,
and cannot. That’s not
a poem, it’s a going,
and why would you
bury your goods away
for so long? Maybe
so that when they find them
stockpiled beside the swag
of other defunct regimes
and having the consistency,
like my own feelings
at times, of flour
blended with cold
butter or snow
refrozen after a thaw,
they’ll really, and at last, be
worth something.
Isn’t that what “dehumanizes”
you? When everyone assumes
you’re obsessed
with money
because of what you are
and not
because of who we are?
As much as I admire
the ruined city from above,
it’s there, smiling,
our vanity,
to delight in the works
of our kind.
But it is beautiful,
you would say, probably
from the exit row.
Of course
the objects of our vanity
are beautiful.
Lacking in life,
have I been lacking
in death?
These are the tears
we shed for the loss
of our eyes.
What hope
could there possibly be
in boredom?
That those
dismantling you
will move on
to other things.
I’m so sick
of your distinctions:
it wasn’t gas,
it was an incendiary
bomb; it wasn’t
a child, he was
fifteen. We think
you’re missing
the point:
we make do
with insufficiency
throughout. Look
at our faces. Take
a good look
at our goodbyes.
And still, there have been
times, and will be again,
when the only way
was rescue,
and rescue came.
Benjamin Paloff's books include the poetry collections And His Orchestra (2015) and The Politics (2011). His poems have appeared in Boston Review, New American Writing, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and others, and he is the guest editor of the Fall 2019 issue of Michigan Quarterly Review. Twice a fellow of the NEA, he lives in Michigan.
that sun was not
one to recollect
that blue lies
by multiple
pre-dispositions
no use to me, the thought
divided, as one reasons, all the more
the world, of
eyes, intent to soften, to clear the facts that aren’t
made to wait, the eye softened, a witness for the cloud’s
intent, not yet cloud and
thank you
space
in order
for the afternoon
to be
root, for example
ensemble of sail to skin the name is unfinished
growing in the wild and “the rosy dream alone” you
say
the inversion of the image
in its page the alternate of thorn
a nest below this figure, more than in their smiles, false if –
in the passing of time – merely
plum, white tresses and white
garland
and one is already made, cannot
go back and spill the water, and
at least I
don’t have letters; however,
as you say in Spanish the seeds are so
sensual the asylum notes rewinding
dream of growing in the wild, and lonely for
you, said I
The sky is the paper
below which plum
branches
plum branches in the white mountains
the page you want to be
alone
but as you said, the seed
of the book is
grass will come to light, so a shroud, bereft
his sail
except
for a sprint of air
the world
as when
it rose accomplished
a bright sphere to retrace the body
now become a stone in water
below the fold in paper
to thus lament is otherwise bereft
and you are present, which means
the beam from dark season, stranded floor
a conjecture has been present, the ‘almost’ of the blush. Most
leaves mean you have your rose. Windless you have,
water-resilient, diurnal black
not knowing, or through the last lap of the radiant
through
swift rue
my corpse, that I lament
lament the sea rose to cleanse the air, in that it is
Steven Salmoni’s recent publications include A Day of Glass (Chax Press, forthcoming 2019), the chapbook Landscapes, With Green Mangoes (Chax Press, 2011), poems in Nerve Lantern, Fact-Simile, Spinning Jenny, Versal, Sonora Review and Bombay Gin, and articles in The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein, Studies in Travel Writing and The Journal of Narrative Theory. A selection of his work was included in the anthology, The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide (U of Arizona Press, 2016). He received a Ph.D. from Stony Brook University and is currently the Department Chair of English at Pima Community College, Northwest Campus in Tucson, AZ. He also serves on the Board of Directors for POG, a Tucson-based literary and arts organization that promotes an annual reading series.
When the answer cannot be put in words, neither can the question be put in words.
And then my cat added, mrgnow.
Which is a quote from great classic of Irish literature.
And everything he said after that
felt a little political. Classical.
When the answer cannot be put in words, neither can the question be put in words.
When the answer cannot be put in words, neither can the question be put in words.
And so I asked,
How does that melody go?
The song
where the brother
holds the receiver to the father’s mouth
and I am far away
and say something awkward
about how I feel, and I hear him breathing
into the phone
as if he carried some great burden, some message,
he is hoping to lay down.
*
What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,
said the silence.
And then the whole sentence unraveled
into music.
And the silence was a part.
The part where the singer breathes.
What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,
—————
Look at me.
My dreams say in the morning.
But when I answer,
I am dead to them.
My voice sounds more and more
like my father’s.
My silence less and less.
*
The passports of the tombstones
have all been dated, stamped,
abandoned. The rain shivers through. The sky goes clear.
Flowers, if there are flowers,
fresh-cut as the names they lie on,
they last a week or two
before they join the clippings of the morning.
The stone angels have all gone blind,
and those who talk to them speak of regret, reunion, something
in the news.
Those whose hearts are stones that listen.
When I was a boy, I played alone
with matches in the garden,
and the little souls of the ants were at my mercy.
I was more afraid than I knew
of solitude and worse. Its absence. I was cruel.
And then more sweetly miserable.
I was powerless
to stop. I thought. Better to say I was a stranger
to my power. I was the abandoned field
in a pastoral.
And I stared transfixed into the fire.
*
As a child I learned and forgot and learned again
everything
has a name, save one.
G-d, the nameless, made them so.
Every man with his face in the warm cloud above his cup.
And I know: everything
is
a name already
and so bereft of its nameless home.
Among the many, there is one who drinks my dollar
and the one who does not,
and one who in her cold flesh wakes
to the dream of a republic.
God loved me as a child.
Every dawn I cast my shadow to the shadows.
And, bidden or unbidden, my silhouette returns.
Like a child, it clings.
As the day grows old.
*
Bidden or unbidden, God abideth. So says the tomb
of a Swiss in the Latin of a Dutchman,
cribbed in turn
from an unnamed Greek.
Bidden or unbidden,
the mist above the Allegheny
rises through the fathoms and just keeps rising.
One man’s comfort is another’s paranoia.
One man’s God, a sheriff. Or another, a nurse.
One man’s forsaken conscience
returns, and he knows
his drinking is a problem, and so he drinks.
And bidden or unbidden,
the Allegheny in the rainy season tears a tree from shore.
The dead are talking under us, the water falling.
We know they are not talking really, and so they talk.
And the wheel of the rose cart crackles
through the leaves.
*
Bidden or unbidden, dream visits the sleepless man,
and so he wakes.
And so he wakes again.
And when he looks at you, he sees a mist
and the river with its branches borne downstream.
The dead are talking over him.
Named or nameless, they are flashing through the water,
as water,
somewhere, flashes through the form it takes.
The Allegheny and the rain and the ache of mist
in the morning, they fall across threshold
into the dream that leaves,
and why.
Form flashes through form as hunger flashes through a brain
Wine through the laughter.
Laughter through the blood.
Light flashes through the ice it breaks.
I swear.
And the oceans rise.
These days, the town lies restless, old,
and busy getting older, getting there.
The wrecking ball makes an ecstasy
of brick, the dust rises, the smoke subsides.
It’s here I looked down at my body
and found it was not mine after all,
but more a house I rented, the beaten-down
palace of my youth, alive with ghosts
of old lovers, friends. If you touch this,
it tremors still. It shivers back to life
like a bird inside a sorcerer’s pocket.
She was my first. And I moaned God
or Sandy, without thinking. In the moment
of our union, I was broken in two.
*
When ashes fall, the word for ashes falls
a little later. Little, I say, in deference
to a moment whose margins are enormous.
The measure of an arrow at the speed
of light is not its end. I confine myself
to earth, however deadly here, because
the skies are lovely. They breathe. Every time
I speak the word breadth, it comes out
breath. So much of love is obvious:
spouse, cats, the colors of our particular dawn
fading in the sea. Somewhere are the names
my mother taught me, though I cannot tell
you whose are whose. She is in there, I say,
alone, afraid. Blue, black, phosphorescent.
*
Light falls from the sky to glass to table,
and we call it one light, across the faces,
one blaze that has no face. I have heard
that music is a language. It is. It is not.
The more specific I am the more music
I lose. The more general I am, likewise.
Music is a language in the way the cries
of wolves are, and not, and cannot be
torn from their occasion. Instinct makes
their voices general, their pain specific,
their echo large. I think therefore I am
standing before a canyon. I am small.
The cant of two in one is everywhere,
the blade of is that cuts the bread of light.
*
When I first saw Earth from a distance,
I was told the marble stood for one
world, and I was standing on an icon,
although I could not see it without help.
It must have been the dark around it
that made this little lamp so priceless,
as eyes are, and the skies they gather,
the black in them that dwindles to a star.
My mother told me once, do not worry.
You are young. You have a long life
ahead. No need for a child to dwell
on such things. It helped. And then it didn’t.
It taught me. When children ask about
death, they must be speaking of their own.
*
Our first world, before we realized it,
as first, or ours, or there to wander
and explain—it never left completely,
never abandoned what we think about
and how, although it feels far away,
nameless, as rivers meeting oceans are,
or particles waves, a child the lion
of homes on fire, bereft of words to meet them.
Our first world is there, as silence is
in the invitation to speak, abstention
in the glass through which the daylight falls.
Our word mother materialized through
a hole in the air that was motherless,
although her absence calls to us as ours.
Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-five books including, most recently, Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, SIU Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way, 2017), Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (L.E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, 2018), Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse, 2018), Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019), and Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU, 2019). Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas.
If a cloud could coo, or cluck—then what? If a cloud cowers at the edge of a canyon, thinking “I’ve been here before.” The cloud does coo; we hear it! Doves coo, as do pigeons. They coo their similitude. Now shadows fill the canyon like water in a bathtub. The mailman stumbles over the curb delivering not a single telegram. I was jaundiced at birth but fixed in the sun like a photograph of myself. For years, I was a photograph progressing rapidly through inseams. I exited the bathroom into a pincer maneuver; whereby the red force envelops the advancing blue force. A blue hat lays somewhere under the green side of the earth.
Dirigible air parade berth above Honeymoon Bay. Drizzle as a dollar word, keyboard schmutz is here to stay. One of my guilty pleasures, but how guilty? Tater tot lapdog of the establishment, the candor of left-handed dancers. All I wear are gold toes. Between alone and not alone—there I am. Scuffs make a sneaker say, “Hey!” Mandible crunch going total vore in the poem, take a stab at the orchestra. Sub- patterns of laughter resonate from the limbic. Amidst the mist and connoisseurs of parallelograms maybe tootsie with the talent. Gigglenastic knickerbocker. An eye sore, or a sight for sore eyes, I don’t know which.
Will Stanier is a poet and a letterpress printer living in Tucson, Arizona, where he's an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Arizona. He's the author of a chapbook and an artist’s book, called “Pizza Place." Recent work may be found at tenderness lit, Yes, Poetry, Cleaver Magazine, and Partial Zine.
A collection shot through with humble devotion to the momentary and transient, Small Sillion, (Pallor Press/ Free Verse Editions 2019) Joshua McKinney’s fourth collection of poems, traces the furrows of experience at the boundaries of language, recovering and ultimately uncovering space for the transcendent in this secular world. This uncovering is rooted in the open-field system of agriculture prevalent in much of Europe through the Middle Ages and into the 20th century, where the large fields where divided into many narrow strips of land, or selions, cultivated by serfs. The selion, as nonce-word, discovering its Old French origin in sillon, that distinctive ridge and furrow pattern of open-field agriculture, becomes the sillion of Hopkins’ “shéer plód makes plough down sillion / Shine,” which opens the collection. The agricultural and linguistic dredging situates the furrows of McKinney in the sacredness of even the most mundane act, the most basic cultivation, the “No wonder of it:” as language, act, perception, and ultimately being, point beyond themselves. This devotional articulation, this attuned description of language’s consequent incompatibility with experience and the graceful, combined with the humble, and human willingness in McKinney to keep engaging and encountering, is the substance of this collection. With hands full of the fertile soil upturned and uncovered by the plough, the poet in Small Sillion unearths the furrows, the language of a land now fallen mute.
This unearthing through attendance to the origins, the furrows through language’s first cause, is a moral act for the poet, as in the opening poem, the soft “Hum,” where through the monosyllabic and heavily alliterated language there is an uncovering not only of the description of what comes across as a hummingbird startling the speaker into his own being-as-apart-from, but also the origins of English poetry as Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, a rooting in origins;
When I smelled green through the blur
where its wings were, felt
the whir of their arc, heard the red
of its ruby throat-scales, tasted the dart of its forked tongue
afloat in the foxglove—my only desire was
to tell you. (7)
As the poem moves through the speaker’s attempts to call to the lyrical you, and finds that his language is “rote, broken,” unable to grasp and articulate the bird’s presence and the transcendent experience of it, an opening occurs where the syllables become heavier marking the boundary between the speaker and the world. The poem flashes back into the close and grounding monosyllabic sequence at its conclusion as the moral imperative is established in what can only be read as the aesthetic thrust that becomes the rest of the collection;
It was then I knew my exile’s full extent.
The phenomenon of pungent sound is brighter—
sheer iridescent now there then—
than the hours of thought without flesh. Once, to be
at one meant to act, so I have tried to make this
matter. (7)
McKinney does make it matter throughout this collection. Oftentimes we see the speaker confronted with his own failed attempts to try to understand the beauty of the natural world around him and his willingness to acknowledge that it is in him where the beauty is distorted and denuded and not in the world. Another bird enters the collection, this time a scrub jay, in “The Understanding,” to proclaim something that the speaker has forgotten “something / sacred something wholly / mundane,” (14). The mundane, the collection reminds us, in it’s etymological origin, speaks of the ‘earthy, terrestrial,’ the locale where the poet is “a dweller in the earthly world” (31). As such a denizen, the poet seeks to recover the obsolete syllable, and finds another first cause echoing in the jay’s song;
If all that I can understand were all there is…
but no the jay is otherwise
a something I cannot translate or touch.
What won’t suffice
must and that fact draws me to my desk
each morning
where distracted by the racket outside
my understanding
damned
within the limit of this language
I rejoice in its failing
in the mind’s grateful
graceful sense of boundary—
the faith
that I am favored with
such bounty. (15)
“The Understanding” echoes, while reversing the last stanza of Pound’s “To-Em-Mei’s ‘The Unmoving Cloud,’” as here it is not the bird, but the speaker who laments the limits of his understanding, even while acknowledging that estrangement is not something to condemn. In the estrangement is the cause to “rejoice” of the naturalism of the mind’s engagement with the world. For McKinney, this is not a problem of idealism; it is rather, a simple recognition of the limits of this earthly world, our being in it, and the acceptance that comes through “the faith / that I am favored with / such bounty,” in the scrub jay’s song beyond our attempts to define.
Language’s failing and the transcendent experience accompanying it are not the only celebratory failures in this collection. The foregrounding of perception’s first articulation and its collapse mirrors the heavily enjambed lines of “The river was,” where our perception is continually stifled with each line break, where attention’s grab toward meaning is temporary before we are thrust “into the doctrine / of a moment only” (24). The poem begins with the enjambed title “The river was” continuing into the first lines “green expect / where it was silver I drove / above it wondering,” (24). The perception’s collapse of color foregrounds “the failure / of memory” in trying to remember an all too familiar river’s name and the accompanying shift of attention as the speaker holds his lover’s hand, the physical touch displacing memories lapse, one moment’s perception shifting into another. The poem reaches its ecstatic crescendo through another origin, the plough’s furrow ridging an exclamation of poetic diction in “O,” struck from the English canon since Wordsworth’s democratic purification and since, especially in the 20th century, used often as an ironic nod. Here, however, it is not drained of its emotional gravity as the poem illuminates how wrong the speaker’s first impression was by rephrasing its opening lines,
O
my love my driving
eyes the river
is green
except where it is
silver
and it is silver
everywhere (24)
Perception’s slippage does not just lend itself to the meditative lyric in McKinney, as in “Another Day in the Perishing Republic” where the first impression leads to a humorous conclusion. The title hides in plain sight setting up the poem like any other lyric with a nod to the seemingly forgotten, the furrows ridge again uncovering, Robinson Jeffers. The poem opens in a mode McKinney is very comfortable in, wonderment at the world where “the lowering sun / hung in the pine tops” and “the very air / shone gold” (34) as the speaker goes out for an afternoon jog. He sees someone in the distance who he believes is dancing because they are sharing the same transcendent experience of world, “I thought it joy, / or perhaps awe / at the same light I had seen” (34). After having finished what appeared to be dancing, he turns, waves, and drives off, and the speaker thinks, “and all was good,” however when he reaches the spot that the man had just left he realizes that he wasn’t dancing, tragically he finds “a king snake / he had stomped to death” (35). McKinney is adept at this leading, this perception shifting, throughout the collection where poem after poem unmakes its own origin, unearths its own facts, sometimes absurdly as in “Another Day in the Perishing Republic” but more often than not uncovering the limits and boundaries of our all too human experience.
It is in this human experience that McKinney’s poetry in Small Sillion shines through the freshly upturned furrows of the rich loam of language. These are the poems of moments, that not only express, but actually become, the life well lived; what the wind can teach the poet, the sight of deer’s eyes in a dark field, the experience of reading his students’ poems, or the silence of an immense mountain demanding to be read. All this has become the site for the transcendent, the heavy weight of a little act faithfully paid attention to. It is ultimately this act of attention raised to an art that flashes through these poems, in each instance a rendering, spiritually lifting the mundane into the sacred. Joshua McKinney’s newest collection becomes a transcendent experience itself, and you must experience it.
Samuel Gilpin is a poet originally from Portland, OR, living in Las Vegas, NV, as a Black Mountain Institute Ph.D. Fellow in Poetry at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A Prism Review Poetry Contest winner, he is currently serving as the Poetry Editor of Witness Magazine and Book Review Editor of Interim. A Cleveland State University First Book Award finalist, his work has appeared in various journals and magazines, most recently in The Bombay Gin, Omniverse, and Colorado Review
