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Canadian artist Shannon Kernaghan is inspired by items discovered in unexpected places. Her work invites viewers to suspend linear thinking and perceive her mixed media as a sum of elements, pieces of a puzzle that when re-shuffled, evoke personal memories and surprising sensations. Her narrative is based on the tricky dynamics of desire and passion. More at www.ShannonKernaghan.com
Seldom has a single issue of Interim presented such a varied mitzvah! Curated during our collected home quarantine from COVID-19, Volume 37 .1 features a company of poets, translators, and essayists that we are especially proud to include in our magazine, as together their projects represent the health of our literature, circa 2020.
New to our online issues is a special features section, where you will see the very first English-language translations of a unique corpus of poems from medieval France, the fatrasies and fatras. Vying between the dream grammar of the “possible” and the “impossible,” the poems present, as translator Donato Mancini writes in the preface “Blinded by a Burst of Laughter: Translating the Impossible” an “unfolding like the fevered hallucinations of a diligent, torturously overworked grammar student.” In their semantic and thematic hijinks, these poems are also remarkable in how they seem to prefigure French Surrealism and Dada. Almost 690 years ago this past Easter Sunday the poems were performed for King Philippe VI, in Paris, in 1329 or 1330. As resurrection is the fervent hope of the world in this period of confinement, we feel certain somehow that this anniversary is no coincidence in the cosmic scheme of things! If it is indeed true that every great period of literature is also a period of translation, then Bryne and Mancini’s introduction to the fatrasies and fatras serve as proof that now is such a time, as do renowned poet Carolyn Forche’s translations of Fernando Valverde’s poems on immigration, which are also included in this extraordinary issue.
We are especially pleased to include two poems by Carl Dennis, Pulitzer Prize winner for his beautiful Practical Gods (2002). “Another Sabbath” and “Two Chapters” offer readers narrative poems that are parables grounded in vatic insight—an insight direly needed in the rapid-fire sound bites of our contemporary life. In keeping with our decades long commitment to publishing emerging writers, we’re pleased to introduce Eliot Smith’s poems to Interim readers. We’re thankful that he chose Interim for his first appearance in print, and we have no doubt, based on the quality of the writing shown here, that his work will continue to find a home in many venues. We include also a selection of poem from the manuscripts of the Test Site Poetry finalists. While vastly different in method and scope, all share a connection to the oldest purpose of poetry—a desire for truth—which is evident throughout the range of their artistic experiment.
Finally, we are sure readers will also enjoy the innovation in Micah Jeffrey’s essay, “The Modern Prometheus.”
We send out wishes for health and happiness, and hope for the day coming soon when we’ll go outside again, happy for our return to the daily exchange with friends and strangers, wiser and full of further gratitude, for our time spent without it.
Editor, Interim
Las Vegas
8 April, 2020
Our book, A Flea the Size of Paris (Black Widow Press, 2020), comprises the very first English-language translations of a unique corpus of absurdist poems from medieval France, the fatrasies and fatras. Describing these poems, it's best to avoid the term “nonsense,” given that word's sticky associations with snarks, jabberwockies and monty pythons. A better term was proposed in 1432 by the poet Baudet Harenc, to distinguish between two styles of fatras: the “possible” (realistic, rational, cogent) and the “impossible” (irreal, irrational, disjunctive). The fatrasies and fatras are indeed poems of the impossible, unfolding like the fevered hallucinations of a diligent, torturously overworked grammar student.
A fatrasie is a suite of eleven stanzas of eleven lines each. Within each stanza, 6 lines of 5 syllables are followed by 5 lines of 7 syllables. The first 6 lines are set in a see-saw, even nursery rhyme rhythm. The latter 5 lines break this cadence, so that line 7 functions as a volta, sounding an abrubt shift of rhythm and manner. It's as if the fatrasie stanza, as medievalist Giovanna Angeli has said, is a collage of two distinct stanza-forms.
A handsome headless man
laid on a great feast
for a hairy cunt
Just then a window
stuck out its noggin
& noticed the crack
Bad things were about to happen
when the dream of a donkey
brayed Hey Help Fire Fire
Everyone wants the altar
where we all got fucked to burn
Uns biaus hom sans teste
Menoit molt grant feste
Por .i. com velut
& une fenestre
A mis hors sa teste
Si vit le fendu
Ja fust grant max avenu
Qant li songes d’une beste
S’escria Hareu le fu
Trestout voloit ardoir l’aitre
Pour ce c’om i ot foutu
A fatras is a one-stanza poem, modelled on the fatrasie. It uses the same rhyme scheme of aab aab babab, but it is monometric, set in lines of 7, 8, or 10 syllables. Distinctively, each fatras opens with a couplet written in a courtly, even clichéd register. (It was long assumed that these couplets were all borrowed from well-known poems or songs of the day, but few sources have been identified.) 9 newly written lines are then “stuffed” (fatras then meant “stuff” or “to stuff,” only coming to mean “mess” later) into the couplet, to make a poem of 11 lines + 2.
Gently she comforts me
the one who stole my heart
Gently she comforts me
a half-dead tabby cat
who sings every Thursday
a hallelujah so shrill
that the latch of our gate
says the tariff is his
& made a wolf so brave
he ran off despite his rank
to murder God in heaven
then said Friend I bring you
the one who stole my heart
Doucement me reconforte
Celle qui mon cuer a pris
Doucement me reconforte
Une chate a moitié morte
Qui chante touz les jeudis
Une alleluye si forte
Que li clichés de no porte
Dist que siens est li lendis
S’en fu uns leus si hardis
Qu’il ala maugré sa sorte
Tuer Dieu en Paradis
Et dist Compains je t’aporte
Celle qui mon cuer a pris
Consistently, across the fatrasies and fatras, each line introduces a newly absurd frame-shift. Fatrasies, in particular, are built, line by line, of sharp contrasts, pragmatic impossibililties, and tight semantic contradictions. If there is an internal compositional rule, it is that the content of each line should be a total (surreal) surprise, while the whole should be grammatically correct. Fatras make a little bit more sense than fatrasies, and have more narrative continuity - but not all that much. What the fatras have which the fatrasies lack, most of all, is the framing device of the initial couplet, which gives them, as Angeli has said, “a head and a tail.”
The fatrasie, elder of the two forms, was invented by Philippe de Rémi (d. 1265) sometime around 1250, when Rémi was a knight at the court of Artois, in Arras. (Arras is about 100 miles north of Paris.) Rémi, a self-taught, amateur poet, and sire of Beaumanoir, wrote two major romances: La Manikine and Jehan et Blonde. Although Rémi is known for the economic and the psychological realism of his romances, the fatrasie wasn't the only impossible form he invented: he's also credited with a form called the resverie (reverie) or the oiseuse (birdsong, twittering). Rémi's original 11-stanza fatrasie was followed, sometime between 1280 and 1300, by a larger group, of 55 stanzas (5 x 11), composed by an anonymous collective of Arras poets.
71 fatras survive in total. Among these, the 30 “impossible” fatras collected with the works of Watriquet de Couvin are, by far, the most important. Born in the Hainaut region of what is now Belgium, Watriquet (known by his first name) became a prominent poet at the court in Paris, and seems to have been a royal advisor. Active 1319-1330, Watriquet was among the first European poets to supervise editions of his own collected works, mostly made up of formally varied didactic poems known as dits. Given Watriquet's social standing, not to mention his acute moral snobbery, it's not only curious that he wrote the often scabrous fatras, but that he wrote them in collaboration with an otherwise unknown man named Raimmondin, believed to have been a jongleur (vagabond poet-performer).
Watriquet and Raimmondin performed their fatras for king Philippe VI, in Paris, on Easter Sunday of 1329 or 1330 - almost exactly 690 years ago. The performance was probably realised in a mix of song and chanted recitation. Given the content of the poems, the atmosphere may well have been loud, drunken, rowdy. Some later, unknown censor was offended enough by the fatras that their sole surviving copy bears the scars of aggressive redactions, while a distinct second set of Watriquet's fatras appears to have been torn out (of a different manuscript) and completely destroyed. Note the date of the Watriquet-Raimmondin performance: 13 or 14 years later, in 1343, fleabitten rats would carry the first wave of the Black Death to Europe. The cultural mood which produced the extravagantly perverse, hilarious fatras would soon be extinguished.
Less is known about the contemporary reception of the fatrasies, but some guesses can be made. Arras in the 13th century was a wealthy mercantile town, where poetry was popular and fashionable. In Arras, like many French towns of the time, there were organisations called puys, through which poetry contests and elaborate public poetry events were organized. Among the puys, some of the best-loved poetic forms were collaborative, competitive forms such as the adjudicated jeu parti (two-part game). A jeu parti involved two poets competitively trading stanzas, a little like a medieval rap battle. It seems that, once word spread in town of Rémi's marvelous invention, the fatrasie form was adapted for use in contests of this same type, resulting in the unsigned Fatrasies d'Arras.
For modern readers, the fatrasies and fatras were first unearthed by philologist Achille Jubinal in the early 1830s. But it is only with the emergence of Dada/Surrealism that the fatrasies and fatras found their first truly sympathetic public in many centuries, when some translations by Georges Bataille were published in La Revolution surrealiste no.6 (March 1926). Since then, the cultural afterlife of the fatrasies and fatras has been bound up with the legacy of Surrealism. Bataille's translations continued being reprinted (often without attribution) for decades after, decades during which French medievalists were almost unanimous in contempt for the fatrasies and fatras. In 1868, editing Watriquet's complete works, Auguste Scheler set the tone, calling the fatras “insipid” non-sequiturs that did not even reach the low level of “mental debauchery.” It is only a century later, in the 1960s, after the American scholar Lambert C. Porter published the first comprehensive edition of the corpus (gathering most of the 71 surviving fatras, and all of the fatrasies), that specialists in the field broadly begin to revise their received opinions about the poems.
How were these poems written? The fatras appears to be an improvistory form. As Patrice Uhl has observed, the rhyme scheme and phrasal structure seems designed to facilitate instant invention. As collaborator, and in performance, Raimmondin's role may have been to provide (and to sing) the framing couplet, and perhaps also to provide the rhyme words, as a challenge to Watriquet to extemporize on the spot. Watriquet probably chanted the new lines that he “stuffed” into the framing couplet.
In composing the Fatrasies d'Arras, one poet may have been responsible for each line, or each for a section, and/or for providing rhyme-words, before passing it along to the next poet to carry on, until they had 11 stanzas. The anonymous collective of Arras could therefore have numbered as few as 2 poets, or as many as 55. Fatrasies thus resemble chain poems, if not serial poems, and have been sometimes compared with the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse) of Surrealist method. And take note again of Angeli's self-conscious use of a formal term from Surrealist practice in describing the fatrasie stanza: a collage.
In these impossible poems, the very devices that emblematize, and constitute, rational order facilitate a step-by-step descent into a bottomless, apocalyptic absurd. Bataille prefaced his own translations with a brief note that can still resonate for readers today: “Many poets must have written fatrasies that have not survived: those of which a few fragments follow here have escaped the contempt of generations, just as they had once escaped the brain of someone blinded by a burst of laughter.”
Quatre rat a moie
Faisoient monnoie
D’un viez corbillon
.I. moines de croie
Faisoit molt grant joie
De foutre .i. bacon
Entendez a ma raison
Se ne fust La Pommeroie
Qui chevauchoit .i. gojon
Pendus fust par la courroie
Karesmes par .i. coillon
Four rats in a haystack
were minting gold coins
from a rusty ploughshare
A monk made of chalk
rose to his glory
fucking a pork hock
Hear my final summation
If not for La Pommeraye
who was riding a gudgeon
Lent would have been strung up
with his money-belt by one ball
Fatrasies d'Arras 3.11 (32)
Uns biaus hom sans teste
Menoit molt grant feste
Por mengier cailliaus
Molt est fiere beste
Cil qui l’en arreste
.I. juedy a Miaus
& .iiii. asnesses sans piax
Demenoient molt grant feste
Por aus tolir lor drapiaus
Illueques chantoit de geste
Une cuve en deus tonniaus
A handsome headless man
laid on a great feast
just to eat pebbles
It took a proud beast
to call off this show
one Thursday at Méaux
Four skinless donkeys
had the time of their lives
peeling off all their clothes
so a tub on two barrels
could sing songs of their deeds
Fatrasies d'Arras 4.2 (34)
Rose de vendoise
Sor la riviere d’Oise
Chevauchoit une ais
Molt menoit grant noise
.I. faisiaus d’ardoise
Parmi .i. tarquais
Tuit li herenc de Qualais
Burent plain pot de cervoise
Chiez l’evesque de Biauvais
Qui confessoit une aisele
Des pechiez qu’elle avoit fais
A rose of fish-skin
straddled a plank
on the river Oise
A cheese-basket of slate
inside a quiver
made a heap of noise
Every herring in Calais
drank big jugs of small beer
at the Bishop of Beauvais’
who was confessing an armpit
of all the sins it had done
Fatrasies d'Arras 4.3 (35)
A champ et a vile
Sa quenoille file
Sans piez et sans mains
Molt savoit de guile
Cil qui d’Abevile
Chevauchoit a Rains
.I. grans homs qui estoit nains
Qui amenoit bien .x. mile
De singes touz chapelains
Davinés ou croiz ou pile
Li premiers fu deesrains
Through country & town
her distaff spun
with no hands or feet
Whoever would ride
Abbeville to Reims
must know all the tricks
A dwarf who was a giant
herded ten thousand at least
chimpanzees all of them priests
Call it either heads or tails
the first will be last in line
Fatrasies d'Arras 4.4 (36)
Uns biaus hom sans teste
Menoit molt grant feste
Por .i. com velut
& une fenestre
A mis hors sa teste
Si vit le fendu
Ja fust grant max avenu
Qant li songes d’une beste
S’escria Hareu le fu
Trestout voloit ardoir l’aitre
Pour ce c’om i ot foutu
A handsome headless man
laid on a great feast
for a hairy cunt
Just then a window
stuck out its noggin
& noticed the crack
Bad things were about to happen
when the dream of a donkey
brayed Hey Help Fire Fire
Everyone wants the altar
where we all got fucked to burn
Fatrasies d'Arras 4.10 (42)
Doucement me reconforte
Celle qui mon cuer a pris
Doucement me reconforte
Une chate a moitié morte
Qui chante touz les jeudis
Une alleluye si forte
Que li clichés de no porte
Dist que siens est li lendis
S’en fu uns leus si hardis
Qu’il ala maugré sa sorte
Tuer Dieu en Paradis
Et dist Compains je t’aporte
Celle qui mon cuer a pris
Gently she comforts me
the one who stole my heart
Gently she comforts me
a half-dead tabby cat
who sings every Thursday
a hallelujah so shrill
that the latch of our gate
says the tariff is his
& made a wolf so brave
he ran off despite his rank
to murder God in heaven
then said Friend I bring you
the one who stole my heart
Fatras of Watriquet and Raimmondin 2
Amis se vous ne voulez boire
Je vous prie que vous humés
Amis se vous ne voulez boire
Dist la paireure d’une istoire
Il couvient que vous devinés
Se ma dame a talent de poire
Et puis remascherés la poire
Dont je fui hersoir desjunés
Tant c’uns mors chiens & traïnés
Fera en lui saint Jehan croire
Et dira Se vous ne junés
Sire vesci mon cul qui foire
Je vous prie que vous humés
Friend if you need a drink
please slake your thirst right here
Friend if you need a drink
said the sire of an anecdote
the moment has come to divine
if my Lady wants to fog the air
& thus remasticate the pear
I ate for breakfast late last night
so that a dog’s tortured carcass
would make Saint John revere him
& say Sir if you’re not fasting
here is my ass on holiday
please slake your thirst right here
Fatras of Watriquet and Raimmondin 12
Presidentes in tronis seculi
Sunt hodie dolus & rapina
Presidentes in tronis seculi
Ce dist uns eus armez de cuir boilli
En cop de ***** si grant medecine a
C’une charrete jusqu’a Mes en sailli
Qui engendra le seigneur de Seulli
La Maselaine dont uns cos se disna
Mais uns harens touz s’en desgratina
Quant il fu mors pour ce c’on li toli
La pater nostre qui li adevina
Qu’avec les angles in gloria celi
Sunt hodie dolus et rapina
Presidentes in tronis seculi
Sunt hodie dolus & rapina †
Presidentes in tronis seculi
so said an eyeball armored in leather
one cup of ***** was such good medicine
a cart who begot the Lord of Souilly
jumped from here all the way out to Metz
& dined with a dupe on St Madelaine’s day
But a kipper scraped off his own scales
after his death because someone revoked
the paternoster which promised him that
with the angels in gloria celi
sunt hodie dolus & rapina
† Masters who reign over the world
today deceit & plunder prevail
Fatras of Watriquet and Raimmondin 26
Ted Byrne is a poet, essayist and translator who lives in Vancouver. He was a member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective for many years. For the past decade he has been an active member the Lacan Salon, and more recently of the Meschonnic Study Group. His most recent book is Duets, a book based on translations from the sonnets of Louise Labé and Guido Cavalcanti (Talonbooks, 2018). Previous books include Aporia (Fissure-Point Blank, 1989), Beautiful Lies (CUE books, 2008), and Sonnets : Louise Labé (Nomados, 2011).
Poet, literary scholar and interdisciplinary artist, Donato Mancini holds a PhD from the Department of English at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where he worked under Janet Giltrow. His books of poetry include Buffet World (2011), Fact 'N' Value (2011), and Loitersack (2014). Same Diff (2017) was nominated for the 2018 Griffin Prize. Two earlier books, Æthel (2007) and Ligatures (2005) were each nominated for Canada's ReLit Award. Published critical writings include the monograph You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence (2011), a discourse-analysis of poetry book reviews, and Anamnesia: Unforgetting (2012), on poly-temporality in the archive of cinema. A longtime resident of Vancouver, Mancini just completed a two-year research fellowship in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore.
1 1. DETERMINING ELIGIBILITY FOR ANY PUBLIC BENEFIT, SERVICE OR LICENSE
1 In the river public a knee fits surfing se
2 PROVIDED BY ANY FEDERAL, STATE, LOCAL OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS
2 vered for a state clothed of visions
3 STATE.
3 shot
4 2. VERIFYING ANY CLAIM OF RESIDENCE OR DOMICILE IF DETERMINATION OF
4 over a fence slammed in yards of dirt in
5 RESIDENCEORDOMICILEISREQUIREDUNDERTHELAWSOFTHISSTATEORAJUDICIAL
5 desert Miles are acquired under the haze of feet toward a sh
6 ORDER ISSUED PURSUANT TO A CIVIL OR CRIMINAL PROCEEDING IN THIS STATE.
6 ore ears shut for sand Over a river even
7 3. CONFIRMING THE IDENTITY OF ANY PERSON WHO IS DETAINED.
7 a river is detained
8 4. IF THE PERSON IS AN ALIEN, DETERMINING WHETHER THE PERSON IS IN
8 if it is an alien dreaming where the person is i
9 COMPLIANCEWITHTHEFEDERALREGISTRATIONLAWSPRESCRIBEDBYTITLEII,CHAPTER
9 f a line is there As legs stretch on a low ripple hover
10 7 OF THE FEDERAL IMMIGRATION AND NATIONALITY ACT.
10 s a veiny trail migrating gownlike
11 G. A PERSON MAY BRING AN ACTION IN SUPERIOR COURT TO CHALLENGE ANY
11 back toward the shall
12 OFFICIAL OR AGENCY OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL
12 ows This story through our political
13 SUBDIVISION OF THIS STATE THAT ADOPTS OR IMPLEMENTS A POLICY THAT LIMITS OR
13 division is a story of laments of limits
14 RESTRICTSTHEENFORCEMENTOFFEDERALIMMIGRATIONLAWSTOLESSTHANTHEFULL
14 Tired is the river migrating wheezing full
15 EXTENT PERMITTED BY FEDERAL LAW. IF THERE IS A JUDICIAL FINDING THAT AN
15 under a border just ink an
16 ENTITYHASVIOLATEDTHISSECTION,THECOURTSHALLORDERANYOFTHEFOLLOWING:
16 d a fence a rail or a door or a wall a line
17 1. THAT THE PERSON WHO BROUGHT THE ACTION RECOVER COURT COSTS AND
17 One thought our border a river shortened
18 ATTORNEY FEES.
18 to our knees
19 2. THAT THE ENTITY PAY A CIVIL PENALTY OF NOT LESS THAN ONE THOUSAND
19 at the end of a sea of pain This is in the sand
20 DOLLARSANDNOTMORETHANFIVETHOUSANDDOLLARSFOREACHDAYTHATTHEPOLICY
20 all our sand and more than enough sand each day shut off
21 HAS REMAINED IN EFFECT AFTER THE FILING OF AN ACTION PURSUANT TO THIS
21 A river flows in pursuit to di
22 SUBSECTION.
22 ssect
23 H. A COURT SHALL COLLECT THE CIVIL PENALTY PRESCRIBED IN SUBSECTION G
23 Here is elective alien Our script is subsection G
24 AND REMIT THE CIVIL PENALTY TO THE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY FOR DEPOSIT IN
24 And dream it the civil and the departmentalized the foreign
25 THE GANG AND IMMIGRATION INTELLIGENCE TEAM ENFORCEMENT MISSION FUND
25 the gang of immigrants a stream a song un
26 ESTABLISHED BY SECTION 41-1724.
26 established Bite down for it is a vein in the teeth
27 I. A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER IS INDEMNIFIED BY THE LAW ENFORCEMENT
27 I love our cement rivers and
28 OFFICER'SAGENCY AGAINSTREASONABLECOSTSANDEXPENSES,INCLUDINGATTORNEY
28 our age of reasonable costs and easiness I love our
29 FEES, INCURRED BY THE OFFICER IN CONNECTION WITH ANY ACTION, SUIT OR
29 signs read by our eyes And just near
30 PROCEEDING BROUGHT PURSUANT TO THIS SECTION TO WHICH THE OFFICER MAY BE A
30 our border is a sign which says Here may be
31 PARTY BY REASON OF THE OFFICER BEING OR HAVING BEEN A MEMBER OF THE LAW
31 reason here in a river flow
32 ENFORCEMENT AGENCY, EXCEPT IN RELATION TO MATTERS IN WHICH THE OFFICER IS
32 ing from agencies in relation to ours In here is
33 ADJUDGED TO HAVE ACTED IN BAD FAITH.
33 a judge of bad faith
34 J. THIS SECTION SHALL BE IMPLEMENTED IN A MANNER CONSISTENT WITH
34 Justice shall be planted in a ri
35 FEDERAL LAWS REGULATING IMMIGRATION, PROTECTING THE CIVIL RIGHTS OF ALL
35 ver swirling gyrating. protecting us Evil are the
36 PERSONS AND RESPECTING THE PRIVILEGES AND IMMUNITIES OF UNITED STATES
36 persons trespassing their evil legs and tongues unstate
37 CITIZENS
37 d eyes
38 Sec. 3. Title 13, chapter 15, Arizona Revised Statutes, is amended by
38 Search the river in Arizona Revise its status amend it by
39 adding section 13-1509, to read:
39 adding a shot in the heart enough to tear
40 13-1509. Trespassing by illegal aliens; assessment; exception;
40 through nine trespassing illegals as one takes a pin
41 classification
41 classifying
42 A. IN ADDITION TO ANY VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW, A PERSON IS GUILTY OF
42 And in a violent river is a life
43 TRESPASSING IF THE PERSON IS BOTH:
43 trees pass a person in a boat
44 1. PRESENT ON ANY PUBLIC OR PRIVATE LAND IN THIS STATE.
44 nears shore a rough land In this state
45 2. IN VIOLATION OF 8 UNITED STATES CODE SECTION 1304(e) OR 1306(a).
45 in violation of states is our river or theirs
1 B. IN THE ENFORCEMENT OF THIS SECTION, THE FINAL DETERMINATION OF AN
1 Bite down on this section If I determine an
2 ALIEN'S IMMIGRATION STATUS SHALL BE DETERMINED BY EITHER:
2 alien as immigrant a determined other
3 1. A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER WHO IS AUTHORIZED BY THE FEDERAL
3 a new force moves our author is federal
4 GOVERNMENT TO VERIFY OR ASCERTAIN AN ALIEN'S IMMIGRATION STATUS.
4 Go over a verified chain Aliens migrate to us
5 2.ALAWENFORCEMENTOFFICERORAGENCYCOMMUNICATINGWITHTHEUNITED
5 to a wall when forced to for agency Some night in the United
6 STATES IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT OR THE UNITED STATES BORDER
6 States I grade and cuss and force more to the border
7 PROTECTION PURSUANT TO 8 UNITED STATES CODE SECTION 1373(c).
7 What is a border save another sea
8 C. A PERSON WHO IS SENTENCED PURSUANT TO THIS SECTION IS NOT ELIGIBLE
8 a sea a person isn’t person eligible
9 FORSUSPENSIONORCOMMUTATIONOFSENTENCEORRELEASEONANYBASISUNTILTHE
9 over some mutation of sentence or a lesion on a body
10 SENTENCE IMPOSED IS SERVED.
10 decomposed deserved to
11 D. IN ADDITION TO ANY OTHER PENALTY PRESCRIBED BY LAW, THE COURT SHALL
11 die in a ditch I need to hear and rescript a bill to show our
12 ORDER THE PERSON TO PAY JAIL COSTS AND AN ADDITIONAL ASSESSMENT IN THE
12 ordering to a page I lost in a ditch in a cement ditch
13 FOLLOWING AMOUNTS:
13 falling int
14 1. AT LEAST FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS FOR A FIRST VIOLATION.
14 o one All of our dollars for a river violation
15 2. TWICE THE AMOUNT SPECIFIED IN PARAGRAPH 1 OF THIS SUBSECTION IF THE
15 twice the amount specified in paragraph one of this subsection If a
16 PERSON WAS PREVIOUSLY SUBJECT TO AN ASSESSMENT PURSUANT TO THIS SUBSECTION.
16 person is previous a subject dead pursuing this space
17 E. ACOURTSHALLCOLLECTTHEASSESSMENTSPRESCRIBEDINSUBSECTIONDOF
17 ears select this Say its our script Say at the end of
18 THIS SECTION AND REMIT THE ASSESSMENTS TO THE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY,
18 this section are righteous men Say art means safety
19 WHICH SHALL ESTABLISH A SPECIAL SUBACCOUNT FOR THE MONIES IN THE ACCOUNT
19 What else is it for exc
20 ESTABLISHED FOR THE GANG AND IMMIGRATION INTELLIGENCE TEAM ENFORCEMENT
20 ept for everyone Tell us of a cement
21 MISSION APPROPRIATION. MONIES IN THE SPECIAL SUBACCOUNT ARE SUBJECT TO
21 song a river at dawn A moan is in this Say a sound a just
22 LEGISLATIVE APPROPRIATION FOR DISTRIBUTION FOR GANG AND IMMIGRATION
22 ice for rivers bordering
23 ENFORCEMENT AND FOR COUNTY JAIL REIMBURSEMENT COSTS RELATING TO ILLEGAL
23 our rivers Here a border line is shook o
24 IMMIGRATION.
24 ff a raw tone
25 F. THIS SECTION DOES NOT APPLY TO A PERSON WHO MAINTAINS AUTHORIZATION26 FROM THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO REMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
26 river a leg for running into a state
27 G. A VIOLATION OF THIS SECTION IS A CLASS 1 MISDEMEANOR, EXCEPT THAT A
27 a flowing of eyes tongue clashing toward
28 VIOLATION OF THIS SECTION IS:
28 violation cheek at the s
29 1. A CLASS 3 FELONY IF THE PERSON VIOLATES THIS SECTION WHILE IN
29 un A class three felony if the sun falls in
30 POSSESSION OF ANY OF THE FOLLOWING:
30 possession of anything
31 (a) A DANGEROUS DRUG AS DEFINED IN SECTION 13-3401.
31 Danger is defined as sand dirt a river run A
32 (b) PRECURSOR CHEMICALS THAT ARE USED IN THE MANUFACTURING OF
32 border is a sediment ring
33 METHAMPHETAMINE IN VIOLATION OF SECTION 13-3404.01.
33 a map meaning flush it away and the river run
34 (c) A DEADLY WEAPON OR A DANGEROUS INSTRUMENT, AS DEFINED IN SECTION
34 s straight through it meant as defined as c
35 13-105.
35 arrying ov
36 (d) PROPERTY THAT IS USED FOR THE PURPOSE OF COMMITTING AN ACT OF
36 er Every reused word proves it Is it
37 TERRORISM AS PRESCRIBED IN SECTION 13-2308.01.
37 true our eyes are a script in a scene our ears gone in
38 2. A CLASS 4 FELONY IF THE PERSON EITHER:
38 the clay of our flung border
39 (a) IS CONVICTED OF A SECOND OR SUBSEQUENT VIOLATION OF THIS SECTION.
39 I invite you for a second violation of this section
40 (b) WITHIN SIXTY MONTHS BEFORE THE VIOLATION, HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM
40 Be within us as moths before a full light chain removed from
41 THE UNITED STATES PURSUANT TO 8 UNITED STATES CODE SECTION 1229a OR HAS
41 the wing with the shine of a r
42 ACCEPTED A VOLUNTARY REMOVAL FROM THE UNITED STATES PURSUANT TO 8 UNITED
42 iver flow in the sun
43 STATES CODE SECTION 1229c.
43 Take it as a song We love to dance
Ryan Clark writes much of his work through a unique method of homophonic translation and is particularly interested in how poetry responds to violence and subjugation, symbolic and otherwise. He is the author of How I Pitched the First Curve (Lit Fest Press, 2019), and his poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming in Yemasse, Painted Bride Quarterly, Fourteen Hills, Barzakh Magazine, Aufgabe, and Posit. He currently teaches at Waldorf University in Iowa, where he serves as Director of Creative Writing.
Donald Revell’s language has a relation of depth to surface, gravity to buoyancy, that is unique in contemporary poetry. His words seem native to solitudes deeper than most poetry can reach, and yet they have an ease and freedom that is uncanny given their remoteness. This uncanniness, if that’s the word, runs throughout his poetry, of which The English Boat is the fifteenth book (in addition to several volumes of prose and translations). Style and locale have changed throughout his life—from more formal to less to somewhere in between; from the Bronx of his youth to his coming of age in the cultural milieu of the Sixties to his adulthood in the American West—but beneath that development—which is after all nothing less than life itself—this peculiar quality of language, this tone, abides.
Words often seem to have settled down on their referents for the first time, with an awkwardness utterly natural:
Tell the taut-strung higher calendars
I’ve a margent in mind and new words
Hope to say, catastrophe to hear,
Old confederates and inwood apples
Where apples never shone.
(“Pericles,” 5)
“Margent” is an archaic form of “margin”; and yet here the archaic signifies the nascence of the language, rather than its obsolescence. At other times Revell’s words seem to come in a trance, skirting regular syntax altogether:
The spoken wish for a violin
Ermine of eighteen identical cypresses
Jagged index visionary without law
God’s signature Mary’s human impress
(“Devotion,” 7)
Even where Revell’s poems are not so thoroughly “without law,” it often feels as if every line in the poem is the first line, and that the lines could be rearranged at random, if to do so were not to violate the integrity of specific, actual acts of attention. And it is the insistence on this integrity that ballasts the poems’ freedom. In “The Glens of Cithaeron,” the recasting of the Actaeon myth that closes the book, Revell writes:
Time was, questions were put, clear as water.
The Goddess bathed, and time was the soft smile
Of water catching the sunlight on her.
And the sunlight, let’s be clear, was sheer murder.
Into the same creature, no human word
Leaps twice. Given to frenzy, nakedness
Smiles upon the breaking of men and dogs.
(51)
The clarity of water is not the opposite of obscurity, but of opacity; one should try to see everything, Revell seems to say—questions, the goddess’s nakedness, sunlight, “human words”—as clearly as one sees the transparent water. But crucially, the act of seeing must take place within a Heraclitan continuity. The attention must take in the whole event, and here, in a beautifully Ovidian way, the dance of eye and mind combines and recombines the elements of the myth into the new poem. Otherwise it remains inert—a poem not animated by poetry.
Revell’s freedom is tinged with melancholy, and The English Boat is the work of a person confronting the accumulation of loss that every life entails. Its epigraph—“Now all is done; bring home the bride again,” from Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion”—shows a concern for the proper conduct of the end of something. It invents a kind of rite of expiration: something must be done to recognize the end; the end releases us from all but that responsibility. But where “Epithalamion” returns again and again to its refrain, Revell characteristically allows his poems simply to end with an unaffectedness that conveys grace; it recognizes the end as the end rather than as climax or closure. In “Leontes,” the poem that opens the book, Revell ends by saying: “We are so happy. The sunlight grows weaker. / Reunion shakes the world. Let us speak of it,” (3). To “speak of it,” then, is the book’s ritual charge. “The Parlor City” (a nickname, the internet informs me, for Binghamton, New York, where Revell attended the State University of New York) returns to the association of twilight and the making and breaking of unions, then ends by simply letting the grammar run itself out:
So many years have passed high time
We turned away as if from wedding vows
In a loose vein of broken petals
Beau cheval given away girls
Being strangers now.
(13)
But for all its quietness (its piety, Revell might say), his melancholy is enthusiastic in the etymological sense that he is possessed, and therefore animated, by it. It is a melancholy with vehement passion at its core, a detachment that does not deny the claims of the thing it is detached from: “Agony was shy once, and solid ransom,” (19); “I am angry to be alone with you,” (19).
Revell elsewhere refers to the “inertial motion of ritual”—inertial, as opposed to the recursive motion of “Epithalamion.” He embodies this inertial motion most characteristically by using the grammatical copula, which balances one value against another using a form of the verb “to be.” The poems’ great, inimitable trick is how their tone, the center of gravity that holds them steady, permits them to say persuasively, sometimes preposterously, that one thing indeed is another; and that is comes to be invested with more ontological weight than a mere equals sign:
Berries are nice, Lady.
Grishkin is nice, Lullay.
The soul of Toulouse rots through.
Creation is one way. Creation
Is the other way too.
(“Fresh Dante,” 11)
Revell practices what Richard Ellman, writing about Yeats, called affirmative capability (in contrast to John Keats’s more famous notion of negative capability). In Revell’s Christian context, this affirmation is called kerygma. Kerygma, in the New Testament, means preaching, proclaiming, announcing. It implies inspiration: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor . . . ” (Luke 4:18). I suspect Revell would applaud the King James translators’ use of “upon” here, expressing as it does that the spirit comes from outside, and works upon rather than within the person. Like his predecessors Robert Creeley (whom Charles Olson dubbed “the figure of outward”) and Robin Blaser (whose great essay on Jack Spicer is called “The Practice of Outside”), Revell sees the work of poetry as taking place outside the individual psyche: as he writes in Invisible Green, his volume of selected prose, “Poetry asserts the consequence of delight, i.e. an outside and worldly life where purposes are real . . .” (27).
As recently as 2007’s The Art of Attention, Revell wholly embraced the canon and values of the New American Poetry: “How I wish Charles Olson were my weatherman!” (17). In the last decade, however, he seems to have arrived at a more catholic view—not by making an abrupt change of tack, but by withdrawing to a place from which the differences between William Carlos Williams and, for example, Samuel Daniel and Edmund Spenser, Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill, seem to vanish, and canons become imaginary landscapes such as those Revell has traveled throughout his life, Arcadias classical (as in Arcady, his elegy for his sister, derived in part from Poussin’s neoclassical landscapes) and, more recently, English: the nostalgic pastoral England of Francis Kilvert. One could indeed read the book’s title as an echo of Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat, where dérèglement of the senses is replaced by the numinous allure of Albion. Formally, Revell’s Englishness manifests itself most straightforwardly in his use of the sonnet in several individual poems as well as the sequences “A Chaplet for Mary: Six Flowers” and “Homage to Samuel Daniel: Eight Sonnets.” Revell’s sonnets are loose and unrhymed; of the classical formal features they generally retain only the length of fourteen lines, the duration most familiar to Western lyric poetry. But more radically the poems turn from the form’s traditional aim of resisting the destructive force of time, the task of erecting Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s “moment’s monument,” and embrace time’s openness:
Time might be anything, even the least
Portion of shadow in the blaze, that helpless
Hare of darkness in the hawk’s world.
I’d forgotten, in the haste of me, to reach
Backwards into time one hand. Come along.
(“Rapture,” 26)
And when one does come along, one finds oneself in the present:
I’ve seen a rainbow where no rain ever was
The colors were slain children of the wind
Alive again because time might be anything,
And earth a broken astrolabe
Plunged into blackness by force of sunlight
These latter days.
(26)
“The gospel according to this moment,” as Revell quotes Henry David Thoreau—kerygma again. I imagine Revell’s Christianity is an unusual pill to swallow for believers and non-believers alike, because it manifests itself almost entirely in the kerygmatic act. There is little biblical or doctrinal content in Revell’s poems and prose; his Christianity, like that of Anne Hutchinson (whose testimony Revell memorably engages in “Outbreak,” from 1998’s There are Three) is antinomian: it believes that grace releases one from law—much as, in Revell’s poetry, gestural grace releases the poem from the “laws” of formal closure. So his kerygma, as Robert Creeley would say, “denies its end in any descriptive act, I mean any act which leaves the attention outside” itself (Collected Essays, 473). Therefore, those for whom questions of Christian theology have purchase would be frustrated by his having little to say directly, while those who do not would feel suspicious—what’s he hiding?
But Revell is a poet who renounces guile: “Who would wish to be known as crafty?” (Art, 13). And if it may strike some as unreasonable to dismiss wily Odysseus and elevate his literary descendant pious Aeneas on the basis of their epithets (as Revell does in his prose), that unreasonableness has also has resulted in a body of work unique in its commitment to simplicity not only as a literary style, but as a philosophical position as well—a “stance toward reality,” as Olson would say. Revell’s poetry admits no distinction between real and ideal, even for the sake of its subversion: “Fact is, faith is, appearance and reality remain tenderly intimate at the origin of poems,” (Art, 12). The present realizes eternity.
Stephen Williams is a poet living in Chicago. He edits Aurochs.
For a while, I speak in sentences.
I catch my breath
long enough to form structured images:
The eye, lacking a serial number.
A white-washed tree, a symbol of radical unity.
A body held by psychic ropes
against brevity and entropy.
A thistle,
its spiky flowers drinking
the poison air
and flaring up in acid
laughter. The children
pop off its head.
I take away the camera.
+
Poets now use simple words, like river, litter, tree.
Rituals honor the living
while we are alive.
What we see as true, we cannot see
how it is true. Real things are messy.
The arm, lacking a life raft.
A white-washed curtain for a horizon.
On the timeline,
a generation doesn’t connect
9/11 to any specific memory.
A cut is art.
An economy transforms its own wound.
Who has access to you?
Are you using all of your resources?
+
The closer we are to realizing our efforts,
the stronger fantasy’s lure.
Unrealistic women
play real women
in scripted dramas:
Opaque
shower door glass.
Animated missiles
yellow as Daffy Duck’s feet.
A man drinks alone with his projections.
Don’t embarrass yourself with satire.
Claws have a life of their own.
+
I think
we’re jealous of wolves
because we’ll never be at home in our hour.
A plastic cap
topping a bottleneck
is not virtue.
A wounded yet
radiant pain
like the sprouting of grape vines
and oil tankers.
Civilization begins
with the first broken bone.
How does it want you to remember it?
What is it asking you to allow?
+
Like me,
a yellow buttercup
sleeps through the great gap of time.
A crocus
discloses its information
not so I can identify it, but so
that it can enter a contract.
Prolific weeds
I can never domesticate.
I approach them as I would
a sacred landmark.
With great ambition.
With a bone
healed true to its voice.
+
Listen: The world
rose from nothing.
The potential you see in others is yours.
A white maw thaw, symbol of ambient spring.
Paper shredded with such precision
that I can feel its hemorrhage
of bonds returning as fruit.
Anyone who’s ever struggled
docks at this harbor.
I spend an afternoon
searching for vacant lots
and cheap land on eBay.
I become a stranger
to protect what I love.
The weird stories. Some of which are true
or true as legend. They burn exceptionally well.
At jury duty, I sit between a man,
a doctor who lies
about his profession,
and a woman
who’s just discovered she has seven siblings.
Somewhere on my timeline,
I make a commitment to being understood.
Why can’t we just live here,
we own it?
A woman beside the doctor
tells us she’s psychic,
saw us in her dream the night before. I saw her
outside the courthouse,
watched her park illegally at the curb.
I’m astonished by her
desire to be seen.
The doctor says,
I’m an orchid whisperer.
Grows lilies in his basement.
His bulbs sprout in bags,
need neither water nor light
and I remember my dream, my friend and I
pacing the corridors of
a brutalist dam.
I never wanted to learn to testify.
Hands are a means of amplification.
I swear
Itching, kneading, touching our face.
Spring allergies are here.
And performative violence
as an instruction.
Now visible in a real way,
like a sundae.
Pollen, a Trojan horse.
First the sniffles, then the kingdom.
Jasmine Dreame Wagner is the author of On a Clear Day (Ahsahta Press), a collection of lyric essays and poems deemed “a capacious book of traveller’s observations, cultural criticism, and quarter-life-crisis notes” by Stephanie Burt at The New Yorker and “a radical cultural anthropology of the wild time we’re living in” by Iris Cushing at Hyperallergic. Wagner's work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Beloit Poetry Journal, BOMB Magazine, Colorado Review, Fence, Guernica, Hyperallergic, Indiana Review, New American Writing, Verse, and in three anthologies: The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press), Lost and Found: Stories From New York (Mr. Beller's Neighborhood Books), and We Like It Fast: Writing Prompts and Model Stories from the Editors and Contributors of NANO Fiction (NANO Fiction). In 2019, Wagner was awarded a WPR Creative Grant from Harvard University to create new sound and broadcast works drawing from the Woodberry Poetry Room's audio archives.
The landscape warps if you look too closely, each mile marker astake it billows around. The skin of the highway shimmers & dissolves into infinite horizon. We drive endlessly west, always following the sun as it sets. Kanorado loves me, it loves me not.
The words dissolve on the tongue, the tongue dissolves—a lump of sugar or another cloud as it glides into place & disappears. I’ve never measured anything by the flight of any bird. I’m told we’re neighbors. To me they remain strangers.
As we head further west, gnarled shapes emerge from the kneeling cloud bank—lions chasing their own tails, sentences broken off halfway. The spiny wreckage casts long shadows over a wide, snarling plain.
We are in this place because it is good. It is a good place, because we are in it. The sunlight strips these clouds like lingerie, every highway milky with rain, every semi a steaming monolith, a fixed & immovable distance ahead of us.
The lily stretches its skin—rolls up & crashes back on itself. The stem runs long & into darkness, slips through to an endless celebration of light. A brilliant flash,
the indistinct chatter of human revelry all around. Glittering bodies hover below the ceiling of a decaying ballroom, kissing passionately among dusty chandeliers. Some have their eyes closed or their backs to us, some preen or pose, some look dead into the camera.
This is the other world below us, the substrate of time past. In this one, they look ebullient. In this one, they look heartsick. The party is winding down. The lily opens herself in one continuous thrust away from the dark. Her roots build a sun-white city on the other side.
There are lovers in the city, there are wives coming home from work, there are husbands coming home, every one, every wild thing, is coming home. They have endured a great hardship here. They have endured a lot of pain. They make love so completely here. The lily curls in & lives all these things, all these lives.
There is a blue jay spotlit on a concrete palace. There is a sword carrying an umbrella. There is a last, perfect kiss before the revelers stream out onto the lawn, ties missing, mascara running. The lily stretches. The other world leans in.
Everything you will experience, every idea or piece of information you receive, every thought, originates in the body. The body is the only fact, the only thing you can really be sure of.
& yet, the body betrays. The body eludes & evades. What a special pain, that of the betraying body. But the body provides the only metric against which to register the betrayal.
How can a body be said to be wrong? Given the body’s propensity to defy the mind, how can it be said to be right? Which is more authentic, the container or its contents? What if they are both made of the same thing?
When you look at something long enough, close enough, it dissolves. When you think on something long enough, it breaks down: When two mirrors face each other, from which can the light be said to originate?
I don’t want to be body. I want to be something else. Wide open, field, sky, ocean, mountain. Something really grand. I don’t want to be mirror anymore, I want to be light.
Between cascade and lakelet appear irregular
vine-fringed mouths She must carry the capacity
to be read Keep eyes fixed upon facts
Receive images as they are “The world demands
proof of woman’s work I am unwilling
it should lose its feminine identity”
____________________
What interested me was
the way ladies survive
as acknowledgements
in other people’s prefaces
the way historians will not
see women in the museum
unless she seeks them out
a catalog of eighty thousand cards
on the family Gramineae
a gentle knock of nerve
this process of a false body
____________________
Into the concept of notation
Miss Agnes Chase rehearsed demeanor
a strange and almost startling appearance
relegated to the notes for other interested researchers
a beverage deemed suitable for a feminine throat
____________________
To record subtle changes in sky color
A grid of permanence
Ultramarine Blue
Cobalt Blue
Winsor Blue
Cadmium Yellow Pale
Cadmium Yellow Deep
Yellow Ochre
Indian Red
Cadmium Scarlet
Alizarin Crimson
Permalba her white
Sarah Mangold is a NEA fellow and the author of Giraffes of Devotion (Kore Press), Electrical Theories of Femininity (Black Radish Books), and Household Mechanics (New Issues), selected by C.D. Wright for the New Issues Poetry Prize. She lives near Seattle where she founded and edited the print journal Bird Dog: a journal of innovative writing and art.
Anything far away
is a lighthouse.
The opera singer
whom people only want
to hear hum
spots one
on the water
off in the distance.
*
It’s actually the locksmith’s roof
peeking above the flood,
but nobody has to know.
*
Later, he walks out to a balcony
—hears a loud crack—
and watches the calico horses
scatter through the trees.
*
Somewhere, on the side of the road,
there are bees in a hawk.
Don’t bear anywhere because he may not
flood (hand) peanut & peasant.
Summer wants the weakest shingle.
*
I feel safer.
Walking the white fence.
Gather Gander Garden,
and the mermaids painted on the side wall.
With a mask on not every portrait is deaf.
My wedding ring clinks
on the bottle I try to
sip from before opening.
*
A hawk rips the violin
that keeps the meadow.
*
Silver corn sheaf
asleep in a fist.
*
Long ago, me and my mother
had a happy first night
in a new apartment.
Soon after, I inherited
my sister’s bedroom.
*
You can’t draw a beach.
*
Honor
is to never sneeze
I painted a white line on the gravel
but the stones walked away.
As I went down the road, the old-timer
approaching the mailbox was whistling.
What a tune! I thought. And
though pierced by birdsong, it followed.
Before long I was at the docks, burning
laundry. But still this whistle followed.
Mice mossed a trumpet. Day came train
bending into the tunnel before connected I
two or three moths singing their small
hearts for the wet dusk and lights
flashing green. Down the road, it’s
all this neon. But down the fence,
the same green whistle.
By now, we have laughed at either side
of the volcano. We touched the spot on
the owl where moon might have an ear.
I painted a white line across a whale
but didn’t know a single man at sea.
Derek Thomas Dew has taught Freestyle workshops in the California public schools, and his music and poetry is featured on the Oregon coast radio program Powerful Poetry through KCIW. It is available on Sound Cloud as well as Band Camp. His literary work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including Dead and Undead Poems: Zombies, Ghosts, Vampires and Devils (Everyman Press/Knopf, 2014), Noble Dissent, Not a Drop, Elementary My Dear Watson, and The Bees’ Breakfast (all from Beautiful Dragons Press). His poetry has appeared in journals, including Interim, Twyckenham Notes, The Maynard, The Curator, Two Hawks Quarterly, and Hawaii Pacific Review. His manuscripts Almond Psalm and Riddle Field were semi-finalists in American competitions for the Word Works Washington Prize, the Elixir Press Antivenom Award, and the Brittingham Prize. He is a winner of an Oregon Opportunity Grant and an Omnidawn Publishing Workshop Scholarship. His readings include international events at The Poets’ House in Donegal, Ireland and at the Lancaster Poetry Festival in Lancaster, England. His work has been translated into Chinese and has been published in several Asian periodicals. He is working on three poetry manuscripts: Maple’s Labor, a book of poems about the physical phenomena of skateboarding, RIDDLE FIELD, and Roman Candle Brake Light. He currently lives in Oregon, where he is studying at the University of Oregon.
They have decided to leave the land,
leave behind the father's house and the closed coffin
and the country
where memories rot.
They have heard that the nation
among all the nations,
the blessed one,
whose name shines more than any other
because once it was on the lips of the prophets,
It is found on the other side of the sea.
The future
sold in first and second class tickets
in the ports of Naples,
of Trieste,
of Constantinople,
grows on the haze of Bremen
or the drizzle of Hamburg
or the loneliness of the Liverpool docks.
The dispossessed come to the call
with their bodies exposed to cold and pestilence,
with a prayer so like a complaint
and the stinging,
and failure,
they are the ones who march towards the promised land
because theirs was taken from them
or because when they were born
the whole earth had an owner
and they did not find a way to feed
but to reproduce
beside bakeries
on the deck of the boats
in the waiting rooms of hospitals
or in landfills
they gave birth to crowds of mouths and bellies
to spread their poverty
and to be then the strength of the factories
or of fields under cultivation,
the ideology of the victors,
the justification,
the name of the country and the authority of the others.
The multitude sails towards the wharves of America
and reaches them looking sickly
and stinks
and fear crouches below hope
which is more fertile than wheat
and can rise over the oceans,
grow in the drought
or multiply over misery.
But the weak and the sick will not enter the promised land
neither the invalids
because the chosen people will be the race
that he receives in his hands as the future.
The return will be the destiny of the infected
because malaria also travels over the decks
and it is more fertile than wheat
as fertile is the typhus of the tropics,
the cholera of the Mediterranean,
the hookworms of the humid earth of Ireland,
the ringworm of Poland and Hungary,
the trachoma that grows on the legs of Ukrainian flies.
The promised land will not be a kingdom for the blind
nor for the mentally ill
nor for those who refuse to undress
because they carry their money stitched to their clothes
out of fear.
It has nothing to do with greed,
the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
God bless the men who reached the land
of freedom.
God bless the chosen men
for the great harvest of the future.
Because all the fathers and mothers of my parents,
all the time past,
are earth.
But also language,
words like Spanish, gypsy, black or immigrant.
Words that rise like swords, walls that are constructed with words,
the old continents, the new continents,
with the fading kingdoms and kings over there,
on the same ruins,
on the myths and oracles,
America rises.
Into it pour the children of the children of the grandchildren of civilizations.
Children of Rome and Greece, settlers of Egypt, nomads of India,
its rivers flow into the womb of the Mississippi,
they bring the water in their veins, they water the fertile land
and then they are food for the trees,
oxygen in the lungs of other men,
water again in combination with hydrogen.
America is watered with the blood of civilizations.
Past is the word that keeps the balance on their lips,
the present is yesterday,
the future is yesterday,
the fruit after a storm was bitten.
I say Spanish, and I do not understand.
I say Spain, and my eyes fill with melancholy
but also my heart with flowers gone, of a mineral taste,
as if it were the smoke of a distant fire.
Only the color of the land where I grew up is as certain
a race.
A reddish earth, often bathed in blood.
Land that saw Phoenicians die, Romans,
Arabs, men
of all land and country,
and also to my grandfather,
and my grandfather's father,
and also the old blesseds who come every morning to the parish of San Juan de Dios,
and the men who try to cross the strait and are returned to the shores of my country
by the waves of the Mediterranean,
and to the people who suffer and always look toward the ground out of shame
or weakness,
or simply because they want to put an end to the journey.
My race belongs to that land,
and the word land,
and the water that cleans it
without paying heed
to
the
blood
that
drags it away.
To have been born
with this language of words
and of ashes.
To have seen the light breaking through
in a country
with rifles trained on the enemy,
in a country
mother of all my equals,
all opening their mouths at the same time,
hunger choosing with unequal fortunes,
that is the homeland.
Blessed be its name,
its mark etched on the teeth
and in the face bitten by smallpox,
its children
see the high seas,
they sight ships,
their interrupted dreams
rippling like war,
now they can
sacrifice their lives,
now they are ready,
they have braved
storms,
they have left their dreams
floating
like cargo
that once nourished them,
they have felt doubt
and they have cried out,
dissatisfied,
hungry and betrayed,
rifles trained
on the enemy,
in a country,
made of earth and blood.
Fernando Valverde (Granada, 1980) has been voted the most relevant Spanish-language poet born since 1970 by nearly two hundred critics and researchers from more than one hundred international universities (Harvard, Oxford, Columbia, Princeton, Bologna, Salamanca, UNAM and the Sorbonne). His books have been published in different countries in Europe and America and translated into several languages. For his collaboration in a work of fusion between poetry and flamenco he was nominated for a Latin Grammy in 2014. He is a distinguished visiting professor at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, EEUU). His poems have been published in magazines like Modern Poetry in Translation, Poem by Day or Poetry.
Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950, poet, teacher, and activist Carolyn Forché has witnessed, thought about, and put into poetry some of the most devastating events of twentieth-century world history. According to Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Times Book Review, Forché’s ability to wed the “political” with the “personal” places her in the company of such poets as Pablo Neruda, Philip Levine, and Denise Levertov. Forché is currently University Professor at Georgetown University where she directs the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. Carolyn Forché was named a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2019.
Some days the water cuts itself apart as though it were butter
so pliable and smooth its commitments to change, its lapping
its changeling tides that murmur its names and new names.
Some days the iteration of itself that graceful, that steady and quiet.
Peeling up off itself, wet curvature detaching from wet curvature
becoming something equal parts parts and whole. Some days
the water is all of its cousins —rain drops, mucus, pink sky —
and kisses them and what’s the color of an empathy like that. Crest
of transformation, wet billow of now. Becoming the wave
becoming the great motion of every dense breath becoming.
Nothing can be spared by you, nothing you don’t already have in you.
Every angle of your sopping self gathered up, tucked in, and turned
in another great turning, roll, rumble through. Sometimes the water
shreds away from itself, unhitching then hurtling back onto itself, because
all crashing happens into us, all slamming brings us back to ourselves
none of us can survive without getting wet. None of us can survive
without water, becoming water, leaving a piece of ourself.
It is how we come home. Absorption is a way of touching
the world. Becoming the lake, becoming the tide, opening the hands
to the keys sunk at the palms, dissolving the eyes, taking thick breaths.
Traveling the wave to become waterlogged, mutable, known
by forests and rivers and sewage systems in other cities, and streams
and tears and slurries of winter. To journey the wave, to swell and to surge
means the fat hands of children slapping against you, the felt
tongue of the duckling dragging its way through you, the
crimson blanket of sunset drawing across your face
it means you are never separate, never other than world,
never other than every thirst for your voice, every kindred
parched or sated but containing your echo, it means belonging
to all of these drenched relations, and leaping and arcing and
dancing at all hours and stuttering with currents and screaming
with storm, and dipping and swooping and lunging and lapping
and being nothing other than every
possible thing.
in our generation nobody doesn’t talk
about the melting
nobody doesn’t talk about the throbbing
nobody doesn’t throb about the typing
when we are born we know about
the screaming trees. we see their
symphonies flicker the dark eyes
of our mothers, we throb about
the mothers, we type
about the fires
when we are born we know the milk
is sour with curdled water but we
drink it & we are grateful because
we pray. in our generation prayer sounds
like limbs in sand on coastlines rivers
sidewalks gilded pools of puddled rain
prayer sounds like sweat & sex &
sadness, prayer the gratitude the earth gave
back to us in exchange for the death
of our species. sometimes it sounds
like we are yelling but we
in fact are praying
Oh, how we pray
we snap our hips and limp our wrists
and Oh how we long for prostrations
we cook what is dead and we eat it
nobody doesn’t grieve when they dance
no body is not an elegy body
the ankles the floodlights the whimpering
shoulders, the flesh doing its fleshdance
of chance and decay, the fleshgreiving, bloodsongs
Oh, how we want, how we are one another’s blood
& we learn this & it is painful every time
we learn again that we are one another’s
blood but not flesh. in our generation
nobody doesn’t talk about flesh
how it burns how we burn for it
how before us generations burnt villages
continents, burnt aquifers, grave sites
naming the flesh, in the names of the flesh
when we are born we know that someone came
before us, someone cut their teeth before us here
on this roiling century. we are throbbed
by forests, flickered by mothers
we ache & we dance & we try & we pray
in our generation we hold each other
by the hip, we hold each other
by the dusty moonlight
we hold each other
by the chin
and all the while the body lays her
bones along a moonlit track
the stars come out to greet her, whispering their stillness
burn, they tell the body, burn and burn out
time like spindle, mortal
like the opposite of stone
hungry stone inside of him
thicket of knowns and unknowns
my body remembers a heaping of bodies
inherited from his tucked-in places
folds of skin beneath his arms behind his knees
anywhere creased enough can hold the dead
he always told me he was born
because the unsurvivable can be survived
skin of my skin
altar of my salt and my palm-print
a father is like sunlight— always dripping overhead
father, too bright behind the eyes, requires squinting
like a wall, a father, all these father-walls compose a city
city of loss, city of ample populations
a city grows inside a body packed in tight with other bodies
a city is a stacking together of elegies
heaping unspoken kaddishes
requiem library without a decimal system
remember the graveyard across the world with the wall
of ancestor names whose bodies never made it back
voices bounce off the walls in the city
raucous of father, seeping fatherlight
the news of it bouncing before it is spoken
the news is a snarl of unspeakable things
burn, the stars come out to say
burn and burn hard
it is confusing to inherit life from those
who survived and still come to us mortal
I thought I was done
writing about the dead
but they surface in me still.
Tonight a memory of him
atop a mountain crowned
in autumn, him extending
his long knobby arm and
at the end of it, a thumb.
His callused, bobbing thumb
balanced at the tip of that
long arm, his eyes glassless,
purposeful, honing on the
thumb. Swinging his arm
from side to side and locking
his retinal optic nerves only
on that thumb, a valley
of browns and velvet reds
sprawling out of focus behind
the anchoring appendage.
His knees bent slightly,
shoulders crisp against the
season’s breath, he almost
could have taken flight off
that bald-faced mountaintop
if not but for the thumb
that held him like a dark
black spool of thread
attached to earth.
I thought I had recorded
every single memory of him
but that’s not the way it works,
our dead coming up for air in us
as if they were the muscled
backs of whales, a memory
cutting upward through the break
in a wave of the waking world,
a long thick drink of oxygen.
On the mountain he was
showing me exercises from
the vision improvement course
he’d been taking, his eyes
bolted onto the farthest bud
of his own distant limb,
the whole world streaming
just beyond his sight in a
slurried fog of movement.
He said he thought his eyes
were getting stronger. And isn’t it
always the dead suggesting to us
the possibility of the impossible,
not what’s beyond our sight but rather
what is there, contained within it.
Mónica Gomery is a rabbi and poet, raised by her Venezuelan Jewish family in Boston and Caracas, and now living in Philadelphia. Her work explores queerness, diaspora, ancestry, theology, and cultivating courageous hearts. She is the author of Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018), and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). Her piece “A poem with two memories of Venezuela” won the 2020 Minola Review Poetry Contest, and her poetry has been published in various journals, including most recently Frontier, Foglifter, Ninth Letter, and Plenitude Magazine.
None of the dancers are looking at you—their faces
are turned to some urgent task—adjusting a tutu
or tightening a strap before taking the stage.
You couldn’t go to the museum that day, so I went alone
diligently committing to digital memory all my favorites,
like these young dancers, blurred & twice shrunken,
serving the vision of one man’s art, then another.
But now your eye is drawn to the green fireflies
that hover above the dancers’ heads,
and that aren’t Degas’s, but the museum’s lighting
translated through layers of glass—tiny fluorescent dancers
disrupting the composition of this moment,
whose pixels have faintly rearranged what was
preserved in oil paint—the moment endlessly before
the programmed event when the dancers’ muscles
will convert stored energy into a spectacle of light.
Along the rows of the kitchen garden
the woman makes
small mounds of bedstraw.
The iron edge of the hoe
bites into the earth.
An oriole utters
into the deep red. In another country
an unmanned aircraft
flies over burning fields.
As each red sky
reaches into the great darkness
the woman pulls off her gloves.
Behind her, thin square
shadows of the wire fence
lift from the chopped radicchio.
From the black sleeve of his dream
Jacob delivers a shadow of the other
universe: the chattering of wooden
tiles: shuffle of angel feet on the ladder.
Between them, a red
ribbon draws itself
in the sand: the partition
between waking
and its white reflection.
There is no trick. No knot.
The ribbon draws
their blood.
The memory walks
toward him again, frightened
bees spilling from her head.
The ribbon turns between unearthly
places: a twist of her wrist
unstitches
the rhododendron: the angels don
the long skirts of battle: the garden
swallows
its blossom: the hair of the dandy
is Napoleon’s
varnished coif: each petal
a near accident
born of skill
and circumstance.
M.L. Martin is an interdisciplinary poet and translator whose language-based installation, Journey to Shoshone Falls, is currently on display at The Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma through March 15, 2020. Both the installation and her chapbook of the same name (Journey to Shoshone Falls, Walls Divide Press) use archival material, found texts, and translation to create textual interventions in the archival landscape around the canonical Thomas Moran painting “Shoshone Falls on the Snake River.” Her experimental translations of Old English can be found, or are forthcoming, in Arkansas International, Black Warrior Review, Brooklyn Rail In Translation, The Capilano Review, Columbia Journal, The Kenyon Review Online, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry has appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, The Massachusetts Review, PRISM international, and many other Canadian and American literary journals. She currently lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she is a 2018 - 2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow. Learn more at M-L-Martin.com
Tintoretto painted his dead daughter.
But the apple still remains.
So the poem says.
Things that might be yours are falling.
Don’t get too far ahead.
Checking all the locks.
Looking for the subject
Of a longstanding verb.
Year now coming to an end.
Things that might be yours are falling.
+++
You wake up early in the dark.
From now on take it as a given.
There were just too many people
He said last night
When I was a reader there
So we looked for reasons
To reject. Sheets of cross light
In the passage you want to show them.
Song played the same way but slower.
+++
Here you want to say too much.
Here you want to take it down.
No path now runs out from here
To the flame acanthus.
The lighting bolt or zigzag pattern
Woven in the web.
Year now coming to an end.
What’s happening to us?
Is what you think. Another
Night falling at the end of the year.
Another night coming on or falling.
+++
Don’t get too far ahead.
You tried to say it before.
Years ago you opened the door.
Had the spider spun a web
Or was it merely hanging there
Missing two of its legs?
You wanted to protect it
Like it was just one thing.
What Derrida said about Celan.
Or how she translated
Mandelstam. (The step you took
No longer there to take.)
Think about the good.
Aristotle did.
The good is where people are out walking.
Where people are breathing.
Where they take ten steps and
turn right into the shop.
Where some of them are just now
coming out of the water. Where they have put down
one formerly would have said roots,
now one says foundation.
Where they can imagine each other,
where they sing songs about a past,
where they certainly certainly certainly
are not burning.
*
Believe in the good.
Aristotle did.
He says some men are cattle
(I say like cattle?
and he says no, are)
and they avoid
the life of contemplation. Some men
(here I say Aristotle,
when you say men you
leave out so many people
and he says I was wrong
about that you
can tell everyone I’m
sorry)
*
Look for the good.
For awhile I tried
to take this instruction seriously.
I sanded the wood.
I wrote things down. Because of the news,
I thought about complete annihilation.
I sat down at the baseball game
and asked someone the score.
I said I am an instrument
calibrated to the sun.
Which would make this sadness
a kind of accuracy.
*
Lament the good
its having passed.
When a woman writes about the river
and a man would be a river
and Heraclitus speaks about the river,
I, here, alone in the wind
and the tall grasses, just want to get to the margin
and stop. Live in your poems
before you write them, in parentheses
Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Don’t
get angry with yourself—in another form,
in parentheses, the same. What
does the scene tell us about intention?
What inside himself, by saying,
is the author trying to unlock?
It takes a kind of pity to be a reader, pity
and some starvation. Aristotle agrees
it doesn’t sound good, but someone
had to say it.
*
Imagine the good
(1 dead, 19 injured
3 dead if you count the police).
Imagine the good
as already here or an aspect
of everything that’s happened.
Aristotle doesn’t like this part.
He’s turned away. He says this
is a delicate problem
and when I have a delicate problem
sometimes I set it to one side.
*
Close up of a boy
sitting on a bus. He’s turned away from us
and looking out a window. He’s in another country.
He and his mother are crossing a mountain pass.
They are high up. He holds in his small hand
a smaller candy wrapper. He holds
it out the window and watches it flutter in the wind.
He looks at his mother. He lets it go
and watches it go down forever. He thinks all the time
of the scrap of paper, the text, Coetzee’s Boyhood, says,
that he abandoned when he should not have abandoned it.
*
Medium shot of a boy
holding a woman’s hand. The scene allows us to understand
he’s walking beside his mother. They’re returning,
after a long day, from an errand in the city. The boy
is curious about what he sees: the blue sky
above the horizon. He asks his mother if it isn’t much farther
away than it appears. She doesn’t answer
and he waits, he keeps walking, he decides
to ask it another way. But it irritates his mother, her son’s
reframing of the question. The text, Beckett’s Company,
says reframe. And then she made you a cutting retort
you have never forgotten.
*
Rocky the orangutan
who is behind glass
who wanted to inspect
the fresh burn scars of the woman
on the other side
and everything
people want to say about that
Is it enough? His eyes
the only thing in the world
you trust.
*
I concentrate on the voice. (Aristotle says
this just mixes things up, don’t
go too far in this direction.) The voice is what
I remember most. We were in the library basement.
He was showing us, using a projector, slides
of his paintings. But the slides were blank. The projector
just threw a square of light
up and out onto the wall. Punctuated by the complicated
click of its advance. At first, we thought he’s making a mistake!
The scenes he described were from his life. Maybe
that was the lesson, I don’t remember the details.
I didn’t know it then, but we had agreed
as his audience, to listen. And he had promised
to try to make us understand. Now, I know the slides
were part of a trajectory, a history, an aesthetic
pedigree (cf. Zweig’s “The Invisible Collection,” cf. Lacan’s
representation of representation). Maybe that was the lesson.
You’re a person, Aristotle says, there’s no remedy for that.
Carter Smith’s poems have appeared in Cream City Review, The Seattle Review, Rattle, Pleiades, and other places. Further Other Book Works published his mail art/book project Rounds. He lives and teach in North Carolina.
It lulls me from my back-porch beam
Shimmers like the gamelan I once heard
Wavering in, beyond the edge
Of an Ubud literary gig,
Lily pads forfeiting center stage,
Vulvas, stamens, spread like the fingers
Of an open hand, petals strewn
Along the walks, colored fragments
Of the wind, anonymous, without
Consciousness, shaped by thought,
Carrying some old Indonesian tune
Across the ocean in an old gym bag
Till I nailed it to my beam
Where chance makes music of its strings,
This human place, pitching
Pentatonic at the edge of space
Happiness a loaf of bread, the oven not yet cold,
Knowledge the quarter spoon of grain
That leavens dough. All history
That first spread taste, all sustenance that host,
Sips from the tip of the tongue
Then in a final hint of salt, all aspiration comes.
***
When I scissored open her mailed ring,
The f hole of a silent vibrato
Carved a red calligraphy—
Only the word fin dangling from a string.
Now it seems your life has been
Nights on late-night dialup, solo in
A communist block city
The television spouting a language
You could never quite fathom
Despite your years of tutelage.
You gather yourself into weekends
With books you’ve read twice.
So strange to sit at home in Paradise!
But once you sent a cab
To the right Chongqing gate.
Queen Sea Big Shark! Saturday night.
You slipped your key into the wrong
Lock in Dresden, wandered around
Looking for a wi-fi connection
Then slept in Nis, rented a four
On the floor jalopy at Constantine
The Great. Then 300 miles south
Where each pristine beach
Was the life you could never keep.
So you ordered another in Macedonia,
Cabbed it in Ubud to the local clinic
Patched your sorry gut gone belly up.
You barely caught the flight, Sita
And Rama on strings, hitching a ride
In your one zipped bag. (You threw away
Your clothes to carry them). In NY Customs
They poked for drugs and parasites.
The wood came clean. Sure enough
You were a gamelan, a puppet man.
But mostly it has been for you
Home seasoning where you tithed
Your yearly dues, did what the locals do,
Soccer, track meets, Sunday school.
Leaned heavily on a mother
Married to a farmer. She taught solos
To your son, your daughter. You traveled
When your children were grown.
Everywhere you went, you went alone....
Stephen Haven’s fourth collection of poems, The Flight from Meaning, was a finalist for Eyewear Publishing’s International Beverly Prize for Literature. The Flight from Meaning will appear from Eyewear Publishing in 2021. Haven is also the author of The Last Sacred Place in North America (New American Press), winner of the New American Poetry Prize. On the basis of his second poetry collection, Dust and Bread (Turning Point), he received the 2009 Ohio Poet of the Year award. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, The Southern Review, Salmagundi, Image, North American Review, Guernica, The European Journal of International Law, World Literature, Asheville Poetry Review, Chautauqua and Blackbird, among other journals. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Lesley University, in Cambridge, MA, where he teaches in the Humanities Division and in the MFA in Creative Writing Program.
These are the rocks
the long wave of you breaks on.
They don’t need you.
You are the wave that crests, crests,
rolls forward, breaking
of its own motion, a fringe of white,
but you are only you
in the moment the order buckles
on something other, something utter,
a destructive power of stillness,
and what you are bursts in sea-lit mist
all at once, and not at all, and the wave slides out.
Wind in the fire garden.
Wordless phrase
the fire breathes.
*
Shapeless / seized
with shape
the fire finds
its dart, and pitch.
*
A wash of sky.
A waste of sky.
A fire. In the center.
*
(Empty motion of
mind making the sound
of fire).
*
O frame
and fire
my song.
Twist first poetry
from smallest,
darkest words
into luminous,
glass-abstract
syllabic
distentio animi the
pulse tested stark
harmonies on
or against—
and the mind.
The old virtu one
makes, one
makes a-
new, in age as in
youth, fondly and
always
moving. Ways,
places . . .
edges are
useful, but
space is free,
color flares
in the eye,
the grass
is wet. Everything
restless
finds a way.
Yours
began in anger.
The truth gets
simpler, the
cost steeper,
the one dearer
who goes dark.
Whose ghost
evaporates in
a single
word, quick drop
of thirst . . .
Into the labyrinth
and
arduously
out. Breath wed
to breath. So
rest then
in the living
silence the song
gives way to, gives
of itself endlessly,
endlessly gives way.
1
Sleep’s the sentence he
speaks to himself over
and over till it
loses all meaning, becomes
absurd, like
sleep, and he wakes.
2
He takes his waking
thought apart and
recombines it:
grotesques, creatures he
would have dreamt
had he been asleep.
3
He pictures himself as Krapp
or as Rousseau on his back
in the bottom of a boat
moving up and down and
side to side; wakes
to the sound of water.
4
Li Po fell out of his boat.
Elpenor fell out of his sleep.
Both men were drunk.
But the sleep in my veins is pure.
Some say Cygnus is Zeus disguised,
lying in wait for Leda;
some say it’s Orpheus
transformed, to be in the sky near his lyre.
(His severed head never floated
down the Hebrus, didn’t come to rest on Lesbos.
—Never gave oracles
Apollo never silenced.)
Some say Cygnus
was dear to Phaeton, some say he was
Phaeton’s brother who day after day dove
into the Eridanos looking for the boy’s body
after the holocaust Helios’ son
caused burned the world to ash,
till Zeus took pity and turned him into a swan.
What is it to grieve forever.
Stephen Williams is a poet living in Chicago. He edits Aurochs.
god is fire
the fuel
the oxygen
the heat
god is three just the same
even when you’re charred with the flames of hell
god is still with you,
and he will never leave you,
doxa patri ke eioa ke agio pnevmati
my father of confession told me this when i was a boy.
i told him i was scared of god
how the dead body nailed to wooden planks at the altar
frightens me
his blood-covered eyes
always feel like they are following
he said,
they are
be afraid
love the fear he gives you
be thankful for it
there is always an ostrich egg hanging before the main sanctuary door.
the monks sift through the desert for them. the eggs must be rotten from within and the only
way to make sure of it is to drill a hole in the top and drain it like a vein. then the eggs are
polished before being placed in a leather net woven with coptic crosses. abouna said the egg
is meant to symbolize the people that appear pure on the outside but are rotten within; the
people at church who sit in the front row smiling at god, knowing they will sin once they go
home.
i remember staring at the hanging ostrich egg
making the sign of cross with my right hand
positive i was one of them
rotting with sin
wishing for god to hang me in the altar
and drain me like a vein
a white writer said
i was lucky to have all this culture to write about
i was a performance piece to him
i was art
sexy/colorful/exotic/spotted/loud like a misplaced auxiliary tip
the kind of art you look at and say
i could have done that if...
but he doesn’t know
this culture
is all
burnt hair
american flags
and new names
a dead pigeon almost landed on me today
fleshed out with the beak of another bird
all that remained was the skin
and purpled tissue
linking to the spine
the fragility of bone and skin
made me think about my accent
how when i asked for the bathroom in egypt
a woman responded
in english
why do you want a pigeon?
i tongued my teeth
the crunch of the skull
on asphalt
brought water to my mouth
the sound was crisp
like a glass bottle bouncing on a rock
without breaking
Antony Fangary is an MFA Candidate in Poetry at San Francisco State University. His Chapbook, Haram, was published by Etched Press in 2018. He was Runner-Up for the 2019 Test Site Poetry Series, a finalist for the 2019 Wabash Prize in Poetry, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and received Honorable Mention in the Ina Coothbrith Poetry Prize. His work has recently appeared in or is forthcoming in Welter, The Oakland Review, New American Writing, Waccamaw, and elsewhere.
I.
The story of Frankenstein is about a man and a monster. Man, shaped of clay, given
fire. Monster, Man’s puerile harness of that fire, an ugly shape. A metaphor that
makes us: man and monster, lover and lyre, alchemy’s folly, these thievings of fire.
This is what I told myself: all geniuses are broken children. A motherless boy bears the
void, hardens desire, and chooses science: gives his entirety to what his grief believes.
His clay self a bisque in the world while his soft stuff stays with its want; and within the
wet center he whimpers. And from that, the brutal imagination.
Imagine the lightning. Plasma, forked and white against rain, the darker of nights.
There is a lab coat, a stone floor. The scientist summons—no, that can’t be. The
scientist conjures—no, that can’t be. The scientist waits, for the kiss of cloud to
ground, a cathode crack in the indigo folds of cockcrow, and then the spark of life,
more instinct than imagination. More meat than mind.
II.
You had such a hope in me, that I would kiss your cloud. I saw it in the way you
crossed your feet when we argued. I saw it when you tried to parallel my steps when
we walked. And the knowing of what failed was there, betrayed in the
sight and the step. I’d blink, you’d blink. We would take the same picture, but always off by a
breath, by our small hesitations.
There would be a dusk. You would stare into the falling sun, because you knew it was
foolish, a disregard of body for beauty: the maker heart, the most adored of fools.
You knew this, and I adored you, not because of this; you also loved the light, how it
glinted your eyes, made you a different color. You would stare at the sun to find what
you wanted in me, the blown shine smoothing my delineations, until there was only
an open field for you to run through.
III.
The story of Frankenstein is about a man and what he makes. The child hides behind a
curtain, and whispers instructions. Let’s imagine, as you often do: on a slab, the
scientist shaping matter, skin and bone, blood and coil, hand sculpting organ, heart,
liver, lymph. Do details matter? He sees what he wants. He stares into the horror and
sees a man, sees his mother, sees a promise, then another. And waits for lightning.
I told you that the story of Frankenstein was about a man who created a monster, and
you said no it’s not, it’s about the monster himself, and I said that is a common
misconception, and you said the commons were the people’s progress, and I said I
bet you didn’t read the book, and you didn’t say anything, and I said you just saw the
Karloff movie, I bet, and you said that proves nothing. I didn’t say anything. You said
don’t look at me that way. You said I was a misconception. You said there is truth in
the skin of things.
Doesn’t it only make sense that lightning would be the fire of life? Something to
harness, the lust of it, something so unyielding, so violent. So not of bone, so not of
clay.
IV.
Your hope was all around me, enveloping, manic, and I could have crushed you. The
knees you made for me did not bend. The head you found for me did not bow. The
heart you pressed did not beat your rhythm. I was afraid. You made me too big and I
couldn’t fit in the world. My hands squeezed, my feet thudded, my words stomped. I
hurt everything, the soft stuff around you. I could not live as what you imagined; it was
all large, and no multitude.
V.
The story of Frankenstein is about a man and what he mistakes. Isn’t it strange that in
some movie incarnations the monster kills his creator—isn’t it a strange choice? Victor
moves in to embrace the wretch, the skinned Adam of his labors (because we need to
touch what we make, no matter how foul its form). And after its treachery, its plasma
fury, its killing heart, killed, Victor leans into the mass, and a trust of no reason
envelops him, and the creature envelops him, wraps giant arms, creation wrapping
arms around creator (because don’t we want the things we make to be bigger than
ourselves?). And pulls the scientist into the experiment, snaps his bones, beaker glass
beneath the weight of anxious fingers, that large hand to cowl, or small of back,
the places where we fold easy. Isn’t it a strange choice? Please know why I ask this.
Don’t we all believe to bear it away? Don’t we all stare into our want, relentlessly?
Don’t we all know the grief that burns a cottage to the ground?
I didn’t want to be your monster. I didn’t want the story of Frankenstein to be about
you. But what is a story without want, anyway?
Miah Jeffra is author of The First Church of What's Happening (Nomadic 2017), The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic! (Sibling Rivalry 2020), The Violence Almanac (Black Lawrence 2021) and co-editor of the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart (Foglifter 2020). Awards include the New Millennium Prize for fiction, the Sidney Lanier Fiction Prize, The Atticus Review Creative Nonfiction Prize, the Alice Judson Hayes Fellowship, and Lambda Literary Fellowship for nonfiction. Residencies include Ragdale and The Hub City Writers Project. Recent publications include The North American Review, Fourteen Hills Review, The Atticus Review, The Nervous Breakdown and Fifth Wednesday. Miah is founding editor of queer literary collaborative, Foglifter Press.
Though Friday is the holy day of the week
For Muslims, Saturday for Jews,
Sunday for Christians, I know more
Than a few believers who consider Monday
The day of faith, including my friend Maria,
An English teacher at Kenmore High.
Who, when she wakes on Monday
To look over the poems she assigned on Friday,
Finds them at first inscrutable.
It's not a case of their seeming unfamiliar,
As if she's never read them before,
But of finding the print somehow illegible,
As if the pages had been left in the rain all weekend,
Or as if they'd just been found in a jar
That lay crumbling in a cave for centuries,
Lines in a language she hasn't studied,
In an alphabet that she can't identify.
How can Monday not seem a holy day
When it provides her the time not only
To learn an ancient language from scratch
But to discover the pages that she's deciphered
Are addressed to her students. "Look," she'll tell them;
"You're not so alone as you think you are.
Here's company fit for a day of rest."
In the history of my country as yet unwritten,
The woman who fell from the deck of the Mayflower
As it rode at anchor off the shore of the New World
Gets a whole chapter, not just the sentence
William Bradford allows her in his narrative
Of Plymouth Plantation. I can understand
Why he wouldn't have lingered on her even though--
As a note in my edition informs me--she happened
To be his wife. His book, after all, is about
The community he helped to lead, not about himself.
I can understand why he didn't mention the fact
That the woman--the note also informs me--
May have cast herself in the water. His book, after all,
Is about the triumph of hope over adversity
With the aid of divine assistance, not about despair.
All the more reason to give her a chapter--in the history
Of the country as yet unwritten--that tries to imagine
What she had suffered, nine weeks before,
When saying good-bye to many dear ones
Not to be seen again. And how lonely she felt
When crossing the sea with people who considered
The waves of grief that swept over her
As evidence of ingratitude for the promised land
Waiting for them at the end of the voyage.
And then to arrive at last at the edge of a wilderness
Where no one was waiting to welcome them,
No hearth fire where they could assure themselves
That the worst was at last behind them.
And after a chapter on her, a chapter
On the great-granddaughter of her niece,
Still young when the settlement in the wilderness
Was up and running, with its own traditions
Firmly established, own holidays. A full account
Of the young woman's efforts--made clear in her diary
Unearthed only recently--to persuade her husband
Not to join the line of wagons moving west.
Why can't we stay here, she wants to know,
Where our parents and grandparents made a good life
Worshiping as it pleased them to worship?
Why must we leave the land grown dear to us
For the sake of a few more inches of top soil
And fewer stones to be hauled from fields
To make plowing easier? A chapter that dwells
On her effort, when overruled, not to be resentful
But to set disappointment aside and move on.
And decades later, when their children ask them
What the two remember most vividly
From their westward trek, the chapter includes
Not only her seconding of her husband's account
Of the sight from a hill, near sundown,
Of the green dell they were destined to farm,
But also the moment she doesn't mention--
Though she recalls it even more vividly--
Of their wagon's passing, one rainy morning,
In the middle of nowhere, a make-shift grave
With its wooden cross already listing
And no one to clear the weeds away.
Carl Dennis is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including Practical Gods (2001), New and Selected Poems (1974-2004), Callings (2010), and Night School (2017). A winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize, he taught for many years in the English Department of the State University of New York, and in the Warren Wilson Writing Program in North Carolina. He lives in Buffalo, New York.
The party is a shining train that thunders past us in the night
while winter darkness walks its children to work
You give your infant dreams powder milk from a pippette
on Prince Henrik’s birthday, little Danish flags in the dog poop
Can you hear it too? The hunters shoot the animals
in the forest, afterwards they cry in shame, you don’t speak
much but your heart glows like phosphor, actually
the interview went quite well, think red and yellow balloons
the National Guard, free lemonade, growth rings
of work and leisure that tighten their grip around the neck
The thin layer of snow on the road, the ultraviolet tinge
cars drive slowly by the movie theater as in a funeral procession
At the subatomic level, time and place cease to be relevant
the crazy scientist explains to the superhero Antman
it’s exactly the opposite in the world of migrants, I realize
The deeper you fall through society, the stronger time and place feel
like that early morning it rained and rained in Naples
Sammy and I lined our soaked shoes with plastic bags, continued
trudging along the ring road like cartoon vagabonds
We wait apathetically for green light in the empty street crossings
the stars move at great speed across the moonless sky
a sudden tear of wild happiness, the dirty foam on the lakes
Funny, you know, there’s ivy growing through the window frame
in my office at the university, it seems so threatening
so foreboding, right? Seriously, you’ve been gone a long time, honey
The labyrinth lies down on the psychologist’s couch, ready to open up
If all the cell phones in the world ring at the same time
then there’s a staircase in the metro that leads to no place in particular
I’m thinking of an elongated skull, it’s not my own or is it?
Feel like a badly faded jigsaw puzzle someone has given up assembling
nevertheless, the days run together like rye bread mix, and you? How are you?
As long as the last tiger in Manchuria has its own star in the sky
and a bitter wind sweeps across the campus lawn and empties our pockets
the drama of the day fizzles out, the ending has been seen so
many times before, yet the kiss in the copy room still burns on my lips
Hans Lucht is a writer and anthropologist working in Danish and English. His ethnography, Darkness before Daybreak was awarded the 2012 Elliott P. Skinner Book Award from the Association for Africanist Anthropology. Lucht has received writing grants from the Danish Arts Council and the Danish Arts Foundation. The poems belong to a larger work titled SHINING TRAIN. The poems SHINING TRAIN and IVY (FOR SAMMY) first appeared in Danish in Slagtryk.
