Sequoia Day O'Connell

“The Fires I” & “Red Sun I”

The Fires I

Red Sun I

 
 

Artist’s Note:

“The Fires I” and “Red Sun I” are digitally altered images taken on 35mm film in response to the misinformed and dissociative response from the federal government to the dual crises of the Covid-19 pandemic and severe wildfires. The images initially scanned in blue-grey, and were edited and copy/pasted in repetition to represent the artist’s more accurate experience of the reddish, smoke laden air and sky. The fragmented and contrasting images within a single frame were distorted both by their own perspective and the limits of the camera and scanner technologies. Through this process, Sequoia documented the dichotomy between the glaring reality of multiple, very apparent crises and the deeply rooted denial of the severity by those in power.

 
 

Sequoia Day O’Connell is a queer/trans artist, curator, and full-spectrum doula residing on unceded Duwamish land (Seattle, WA). Intimacy is a common thread in their work both as an artist and as a doula. Sequoia’s digitally altered photographs touch on the personal and vulnerable boundaries between body and space, between the built and perceived natural environments. They received a BA in arts and psychology from Hampshire College, have curated shows for Bridge Productions and their independent art project, The Blue Lady, organized with Lions Main Art Collective and were a member organizer and member of the board of directors for the Vera Project.

Brandon Krieg

3 poems

from Joy of the Worm

 

Two Primes

Unbreakable code of two primes multiplied.
Encrypts 16-digit numbers streaming through walls, bodies,

launching boxed products
from six regional warehouses to ten thousand residences.

Unbreakable codelessness of puffs of dust
kicked up by a fly in the lamp’s metal cone.

For a moment I am not re-living
the warm-west-wind, dream-frog, leafing-out, willowy, haze days in this

new edition of Thoreau.

 

Staphylococcus and Anaphylaxis

Staph.  Your nipples do to me
what robot assassin bees
do geopolitically.

Ana.    Even the hairs in your nose, your ears,
appear to be tended expensively.
Even with cheez dust sprinkled on your team gear,
I know posting pictures of you will propagate jealousy.

  Staph.  The growth mindset lighting your smile reminds me
of mother, touchscreens, and wage slavery,
and is even more leverage-able to me.

Ana.    Your ambition is like permafrost burning,
blackening glaciers to melt them more rapidly,
spiking my net worth by sinking
the dangerous neighborhoods in the sea.

Staph.  Now that you’ve diversified my portfolio—
from district-renewing condo high-rises to
unregulated mines in nth world countries—
I could overdose on you, insured mightily.

Ana. The way you extemporize haphazardly,
the way you forecast trends so plausibly
builds in me like an odorless gas.
It will martyr me.

  Staph. Cryogenically freeze me.

Ana. To wake embracing thee.

Staph. To landlord Eternity.

Mass

“In addition to endangered species, there are endangered forms of thought.”
—Brenda Hillman

Pregnant with
pinesap,
ants,
he

stood face to face with
significant unto themselves
horseflies, sunfishes
in wild fertility of surprise

met
Ellen,
first love, she
died soon,
he resigned
that church,

henceforth
bridegroom of
her impress,
what

promptings what
shocking scrawls
wrote and wrote
her name

rainbow, whirlwind

but hiddenly
grief, two curled leaves
think       pray

no-bark dog
days passed over
heart-careful
visited her
tomb,
even the corpse of

summer light

*

Solitary solipsistic
Sol
did this,
solar flare
perception

“not callused
or indurated”

ardent
sequences penetrative
of
deep and copious
impurities

Alone on Christmas
predictably,
architecture
of
snow
twilight
finches

and tickled
later as by wires of a battery
by
wild apples,
raking cranberries!

Can I not rake
thought,
for
hair’s-breadth
alterities, correspondences:

creaking-insect opera

my
thank-program?

*

Did sea never
damp yer basement
unknown recipient,
edge of yonder?

Today, danced
pursuit-retreat
with
the nonhuman swallowers:
coral,
sediment candelabra,
hissing

to dissolve my face
and you
#233
kissed my opens
with
waterfall mist

spectral liquid
gauzy
endlessly unveiling          where

do nerves end?
lightning in the mountains.

I’m struck
I’m gonging
in the language                    I’m repeating

release states

Unitarian

of thermals-skyey
fluvial unattendeds
cliffic gates

allergic

to familiar paradise

Brandon Krieg is the author of Receiver (Herring Alley Pamphlets, 2021) Magnifier (Center for Literary Publishing, 2019) and two other collections of poetry. He teaches at Kutztown University and lives in Kutztown, PA.

Terese Svoboda

5 poems
from Ark

The Charlottes Hold Their Breath

Enter from the right:
        Politics. Meaning?
People taking advantage,
people blocking people from taking advantage,
limited resources,
symbols standing for limited resources, 
    whole bags of heavy symbols with a dollar sign painted on
     gathered at the neck by pullstrings 
     so they don't empty out.

       Symbols are very mysterious, say
   the three Charlottes wearing
diaphanous gowns, the kind the lady wears
         to herald the beginning of a film.

The Charlottes curtsey.

This is where the mysterious mechanical device appears – 
or is it just augmented reality? The history boat, both relying on Now
and maybe some factoids, floats up on real waves
    for forty days more. 

                You've got the last lemon 
you tell the Charlottes,
scurvy to follow. Not scurvy says a Charlotte,
    cholera first, then scurvy.

O wash your hands in those waves,
hot water full of plankton and fish
    droppings and
saliva from the bottom of the Coke bottle
and a skim of oil
from leaky Roman amphora and
    Exxon, and gull feathers,
their mites, and a bloom of algae
        you might want to hold.

The Charlottes are not 
         the girls on dimes,
or painted by Delacroix, nipples hard, leaning forward in the boat,
    or hefty, bearing a torch in river traffic,
or pink-hatted, kids at the knees –
they act.

         Enter the Charlottes
who scatter out of the wings,
          then whoosh, pigeon-like,
                dropping feathers that enter
the windpipes of the rest of us afraid of 
             too-cute Politics
whose flight
is so familiar
it could be air.

    It's the Charlottes who recognize 
Death, 
    the one guy who keeps it open
past the end of the month.
Recognize, like in the U.N.

And you? You're staring at the waves' 
                    hypnotic up/down.
The smell of dying is ambergis
(bile ducts in whales
    that ease stuck food) to the scent of life.

“If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.”
                    – Heather Heyer.

    Who wants to be the posthumous 
heroine? ask the Charlottes, 
        the stink of fate
wafting from the bilge. 

Charlottesville, the movie, rolls.

 

Captive Portals

A recording of the artist's body slamming against the walls and floors of an echoing empty space

Search string: autonomous car window

A video of a plastic bag half-filled with water, with a little machine making the bag pound a closed door

A video about the change from switchboard to moodboard

#carework/labor change/capitalization of emotion: Mom

Orange extension cord poster over the orange couch and a big plug

Not to mention the fact that your data will live on on hardware out of your control 

 

Child Washed Up Onshore

I brought out a dove, setting it free.
Off went the dove but then it returned.
No perch was open yet it circled back to me.
I brought out a swallow, setting it free.
Off went the swallow but then it returned.
No perch was open yet it circled back to me.
I brought out a raven, setting it free.
Off went the raven and it saw the waters receding.
It was eating, bobbing up and down; it did not come back to me.

 

Crossing the Aegean

Once a sea turtle faced me in a wave I rode in a 9-foot sailboat. 
Nice, I screamed. Let me out of here.

I can't look at the photo: refugees in clothing I wear.
A boat that small?

You watch your children die of thirst, the watching part way too slow.
Or all the blood seeps out, pierced by lead not really even aimed at them. 

All the blood is a lot. It pumps hard. The eyes empty of meaning at about the same rate. 
See the video of the dying protester. Actors close their eyes--they can't get that part right. 

Forty percent of you are university-educated and such a vessel is promise. 
You put your children onboard without you. They cry. An Afghan boy gets trampled to death. 

Anti-Islam “Identitarians” crowdfund to pay for vessels to chase and sink the boats.
Four days sometimes to cross the Aegean. It should take 3 hours.

 

Ark Report: 150 – 200 Species Go Extinct Every Day

I.

You see edelweiss but no animals: 
It takes a while to “see” with so few in “real life,” 

a squirrel, a lone gull fighting plastic six-pack rings. 

1,000 times the “natural” or “background” rate of extinction,
the greatest since the dinosaurs' exit.

Putting aside diversity. 
No one shuffle of lost genes better than another, none more authentic.
Just saying.

We must animal our lives appropriately.
Two by two, LGBTTQQIAAP, can we dance it? 

From Africa we come, unto Africa we return
to see the South as empty 

except for oil, uranium and the metals of computer, 
land that must be “free” of all animals,

including human. 

II.

Water is carbon at the molecular level,
every gnat carbon too. 

How a cloud's shade introduces 
the notion of carbon downpour

plus 
possible extinction. 

You hear the connivers assembling before the first drop. 
All aboard! 

Rhetoric that refuses forgetting, should also accuse. 
You build it, they will come.

III.

The Exit Theories:

Microsoft WordScreenSnapz002.png

IV.

Corporations sing irresponsibility, no boat at all.
A module (space?) bobs in the waves like 
Yes, you're not going to be left behind.

Fierce, the winds at those waves.
No sci-fi fathoms-deeps the premise for what it is,
a single drop teeming, ready to drop,

with no sequel to scud along, 
ready for alligators thirty feet long to find muck to rise from.
All the darlings stay killed in VR.

V.

You are seated and belted.
Are we there yet?
The future, no, the furniture 

is terrifying in its construction:
no plan, no clue, no user interface. 
You press Doom and lo!

a bunny pops out,
tricked into the box
by limited neurons.

Fishing off the side, the next species as edible as you,
the worm waiting, 
you scream when its mouth opens wide.

Unnatural, but who's to judge.
You're sure chickens in their cages say your name,
tiptoeing as they do, on their claws,

necks ricocheting in the air.
They evoke paranoia and silence.
On a boat this size, silence

is seldom. A movie once in a while, 
with tense scenes. Instead, the smell
of ammonia, the unstoppable urine.

VI.

Climb a tree. (You've never climbed anything, 
you've never even considered climbing --
the boughs, the height, what tree?)

With the wave poised high as Thailand's,
two-ton cars confetti,
you take to the streets, flaneur-of-flood,

and the struggle you observe is not evil,
it's entropy: that mud, soon washed and clean.
Hail! is what the wave signals, ALL new! real estate, 

overwhelming the cry of those 
to be rescued, unnoticed, unclaimed, unless later, 
in a box to be revered in church sacristies, 

their fate changed to good as a result of a change of location.

If you surround the subject with urgency
    (the bear on ice, small ice)
If you remove the safety
    (the horse, rearing)
If you take the animal from its mother
    (Eve looks and looks)

VII.

You build a sandwich, not an ark.
The hair you bleach turns whiter at night,
in exclamation. Does anyone play

I'm responsible with a bottle?
Quite a lot of name-calling.
Water reaches your neck, bubbles 

break in your bloodstream,
a dog puts his head out the window for air
and gets it chopped off. 

You don't swim or at least not that far.
Your life vest is lead. No guns are damaged 
in the production of this FEMA situation,

except by submersion, big waves 
that suck them down with the rabbit, 
that trick to rid us of 

the automatic, weapon or exit,
sluiced together so weather can win instead
of ourselves, in slaughter.

But there I am again – we. The water's a we:
all those drops. The doubled animals are gone
as the last little pig runs down the beach

weee, weee, weee, weee, but not home.

 

Terese Svoboda is the author of 19 books of poetry, fiction, memoir, biography and translation, and has won a Guggenheim, the Bobst Prize for fiction, the Iowa Prize for poetry, an NEH and a PEN/Columbia grant for translation, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation prize for video, the O. Henry award for the short story, two Appleman awards, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay. She is also a three time winner of the NY Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and has been awarded Headlands, James Merrill, Hawthornden, Bogliasco, Yaddo, MacDowell, Hermitage and Bellagio residencies. She wrote the libretto for WET, an opera that premiered at L.A.'s RedCat Theater, Disney Hall.

Jennifer Atkinson

3 poems
from Gray Realm

REVERIE’S BLITHE INVITATION 

Reverie’s blithe 
                           invitation arrives, that hint
as of salt on from-afar winds, 
the very air                                         
                   calling—
abandon the sextant will—
for departure.                        
        Away on an unknown sea—                 
unmapped or off-the-map—of gray-blue
inadvertencies,           
        unclaimed 
immensities within—                                       

How can there be error?  
How to stray 
                       when there’s no destination?  
And yet—
to embark 
                  in this or that direction
into pure undelimited
                                    space, 
is to forego other ways, to surrender
the breadth of color
                                 to line. 

In that moment,
certainty is a valuable delusion, 
                                           all at once
allowing that quick first stroke—                                           
as when a bow parts the vastness
                                                      and leaves
a wake on the delible surface— 
line crossing line, 
                            tangents and rare contingencies 
discovered, 
                   a scatter of green 
archipelago—as enticing as ellipsis…

And yet—
                   the winds will give out, will shift 

direction, then other pleasures hold sway,
pleasures not
                      of stasis but balance—
of form,
               the other joy.

Action calls for counter-action—
                                                     daring farther
or waiting 
                  for dark 
to consult the stars, anchor a while,
or chart a new course onward…

 

STAR RIVER NIGHT

It’s not a falls 
but a record of falling,

the river’s 
spill into empty

dark: drops
and splashes graph

in the aggregate scatter
a way;

the running over
isn’t random but is,

within the structures and strictures 
of the physical, free.


     | | |


“Gravity makes the image”


    | | |

One star—         

a drop 
in the River of Heaven,

that rush so unstinting it looks still,
can seem 

to pulse,
to disambiguate from the sinuous

arching
body of light

it’s a silver scruple of,
can seem 

somehow not itself
abstract,

but an actual 
mote of fire,

a dense, literal seething.

 

NIGHT VISION

  

When I was a child I saw what I called angels among the trees.  The angels drew me. I loved them because they appeared only to me. They belonged to me. I didn’t think to be afraid.  I loved them because they appeared. They were tall, translucent, and fluttered like torch flames.  I knew to tell no one.  I surprise myself by telling now.  The silence around and within them swirled with a furied longing to speak.  They were mute.  They only appeared.  They drew me. Often I walked out at night. I didn’t think. I loved. I saw as one sees by torchlight, by knowing already what’s there to see.  They appeared tall as torches and fluttered. They longed to speak. I knew to tell no one.  I was a child. They drew me. The silence among them swirled translucent. By telling now I surprise myself.  Angels I called them because I loved them. They were tall.

 

Jennifer Atkinson is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently THE THINKING EYE. She teaches in the MFA and BFA programs at George Mason University.

Jessica Johnson

2 poems

from Plasticland

Herein

Biology is an enormous subject, one that can seem overwhelming to students and scientists alike. In the lecture hall I missed a lot. One rich diagram about cascades could unleash in me cascades of thought, cocoon me in imagining and boom the hour was up. I loved to make connections and study the figures. I did not learn what they wanted.

 

                              They wanted us to learn what companies can use. I wanted to transform the way I see. 

 

          Textbook pages told cycles, cycles within cycles: the efficient workings of the living. I desired ferns and fur and skin. I loved the living, so why not the machine of them? I loved the drawings of metabolic pathways, where excess product blunts production. The language of balance, arrows feeding compounds back into the reaction. Elegant self-regulation. The new created, not too much. 

 

    

—

 

 

A long time later I came to live in a house on the edge of a forest, sleeping under cedars every night, my offspring in the next room growing furiously with sleep. Cedar is thuja plicata, Western red. All cedars have scaly, fern-like needles that tend to overlap. They do not point or pierce. Cedar fills my window, a great green lacing down—countless fingers, new tips of bright growth.

 

                             She anchors the system, sharing air with fir and maple above the groundling sword fern and mahonia and snowberry. She needs a lot of space to make the shade. Her seedlings spindle up everywhere. Few grow into giants but when they do they stay.

 

                                           Cedar offers birds and wildlife year-round cover from predators and bad weather, along with places to roost, rest and nest. Butterflies embed their ova in her bark. Gray squirrels scamper-cling along her giant trunk, their bodies splayed to barely hold her. When I say cedar, I mean mother. When I say cedar, I mean being the main thing. 

 

                  

—

 

 

At home in the house on the edge of the forest, at work for the college on the outskirts of the city, tending two children, two animals, and countless plants, balancing energetic expenditure always with a spouse, responsible for the learning of hundreds of students every year, I’m pulled in circles and pushed by arrows, each day carrying out cycles, each day-cycle subsumed in sets of  larger cycles. Job and sweat and screen time and so many kinds of holding. Daily reprieve, generational harm. All of us lodged in words that end with -ism like shell bits tumbling in a tide. Birth and the death inside of it, joy and the panic it can spark. The troublesome design I call myself: worn down and regenerating, locked in exchange and conversion, trading in the currencies of energy. 

 

                             Some pathways result in more instead of less: positive feedback, where the product turns its own production up. Platelets clotting a bloody gash release compounds that draw more platelets in. The textbook example is childbirth, hormones contracting the womb in ever-amplifying waves until one body exits another. Let me be clear: the body I sometimes wish to exit is my own.

 

     

—

 

 

Herein I translate my own here into small reactions whose products float as if inside a giant body—atmospheric, accreting. 

 

The larger situation proliferates a culture: well-intentioned harm; indifference with eyes trained on acquisition. What follows might be read as a long attention to microscopic, daily countervailing forces.

 

What follows might be read as one poem turning through reactions of stasis and conversion. 

 

What follows might be read as a woman up in the dark burning a candle, spilling words until the sky lightens in the rationed minutes when no one needs her.

 

What follows might be read as a domestic sphere wishing to declare itself a microcosm.

 

What follows wishes to be considered an organism in the balance of self-maintenance and change.

 

What follows is another walking sac of carbon in a climate made too warm by too much carbon, the sac of carbon never not-thinking about its own excess.

 

Atmospheric, accreting: what follows sometimes forms a cloudland. Heavy air takes on more weight and then it rains.


 

 

 

 
 
 

Of Small Devices

We used to place the telephones in cradles but now they are no longer baby-like no they are thin portals to vast streams the way in dreams a small thing unlocks something very large.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We wake to our feeds in a house with a little land around it next to other houses with a little land around them more land than anyone needs and less land than people need in common and to maintain this house to fold lovingly each of its garments to trim its edges shape its shapeable shrubs could be a person’s full time job. Your energy now taken up by your feed by the emotional exoskeleton of text threads with their fibrous connection to all your feelings all your cherished bullshit. You take a break you open tabs consuming abstract notions of students’ ideal functioning and children’s ideal functioning and the body’s ideal functioning. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The students gather in classrooms and silence their feeds. The reaction called learning is often thought to be inefficient a constellation of individual reactions in which the instructor competes in the student’s mind with formations originating elsewhere and no one is sure if learning has in fact taken place. 

 

It is in fact your job to measure learning the products of which are unclear. 

 

The students’ feeds their threads pile information silently the students have stored in their mind whatever feeds their imaginations whatever makes them feel okay for this hour. You are standing in front of them checking in on their learning you feel your own feed humming in the pocket.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the children are in bed you check the feed the feed unlocks the compound known as rage a belligerent famous face catalyzes in a cage around the heart the antique lace of impotence and danger. The strange round hole of the man’s mouth. Even all stirred up he cares to hide his crooked childhood teeth now super white and straight. You recognize that your hatred is feeding him somehow he consumes it and he swells.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The formations of the feed, the text thread webs proliferate unchecked. The forest you live beside was meant to burn. The groundling species first and maples cedar though—will char and still withstand. Wildfire now suppressed the overstory grows too thick the understory tinder-quick to catch.

 

//

 

 

Jessica Johnson writes poems, essays, and things in between. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Tin House, and Poetry Northwest, among other journals, and she has newer work in the Four Way Review, Entropy, Burning House Press, and Dream Pop. Her book In Absolutes We Seek Each Other (New Michigan Press) was an Oregon Book Award finalist. She lives in Portland, Oregon and teaches at a community college.

Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez

4 poems

from Edge Beast

 

Transistor

The ferris wheel races its linchpin 

in the distance. Dirty lotuses 

spread, half-glowing with the red flare 

the town gives off to the night sky 

blushing on the marshes. Palm trees stiff 

sheathes, shadow-shot. I’m relishing 

alone like a song, nighttime my old 

sanctuary, having escaped the hotel 

full of sleeping.   

     Figures separate 

 

from tree shadows. A rope glides 

over my leg and when the last of it

goes, my head holds a rhythm 

of icepicks on ice: two women 

led like mares into the hotel. 

All around, a kind of mouth, silent 

and moist, clamps down. Urine 

smell, sound of dragging. My mouth 

dries out. A lightbulb ons a room.

I slink against the wall, look inside

this night’s only bright.

Cricket sounds magnify and recede

like a beating. What I see past 

the curtain makes my lungs

compress. The women are being led 

into the room to a naked man

leaning against the corner  

holding a  

  glass coke bottle 

casually. Wind lifts my hair. 

The world goes. Still. Now the sound 

in my ribcage finds the sounds 

in the room. Merges. 

With them. I can’t look, can’t can’t. 

Fear over my spine, a delicate

sensation, almost pleasant, dandelions 

twitching. 

 

A sound is crunching 

the gravel. Teeth. I can feel something specific

behind me, a heat. I turn. 

A herd of water buffalo

outblacking the night, their hooves

crunch down a slope and into

a pond where they become

weightless. 

 

Muddy lotus leaves 

laid thickly over water

I part them with knees hands 

trying to get inside

avoid the drop

any sound and the thick growth

muffles my entry.

I’m in it now.

 

I know something outside is throbbing.

 

Down there the marsh grass

down there where the water goes dead

like blind beetles

clinging to the bellies of livestock.

 

Mud meeting my waist

like an old friend,

bullies me under.

 

I’m trying to escape what

is happening in my head,

the terrible empathy.

What is happening to those women

is not happening to me

and is?

 

The moon shot through

with lice, that dark thank god 

and no stars

just the thick growth 

of matted hair over the water

I blend my hair into. 

 

Horns of steel glint 

over the black lake which is so quiet 

like the arm of an oil spill.

 

Hides are the warm tarps

that wrap the bones to the bones.

 

Zanesville Zoo

On the night of October 18, 2011, in Zanesville Ohio, Terry Thompson let loose scores of wild animals which he had been keeping in cages on his farm, then shot himself. Thompson had recently returned from a year in prison on federal weapons charges. When the police were alerted that the animals were running wild, County Sheriff Matt Lutz ordered his officers to shoot the animals. 49 animals were slaughtered. The 6 animals that survived were taken to the Columbus Zoo.

 

i. bovine

He came across the yellow 

bending weeds, swatting, as if 

the air bothered him. 

Above, ascending bees 

with bits of pollen,

sunlight a knife over Ohio. He dipped his hat, 

he rarely said more

than necessary. He carried a thick rope 

tied around his shoulder blade.

I heard his wife had gone left him—

my pity hands made him a sandwich

which he ate, several yards away 

from me, his eyes 

on the cows. I showed him the dead one

and the circle of trampled grass 

where she'd thrashed. He clicked

his teeth with his tongue as he tied 

hooves together, supporting one by one

each bovine leg on his shoulder. 

His music was the only sound

and the crunching of grass

from a nearby animal. Said he'd sauté

the 12-inch tongue in onions, 

throw everything else

to the lions. His arms and neck: the claw marks 

all over him—I pretended not to notice.

His pants black 

with old blood, I would have given 

a firm washing.

 

ii. eclipse

Moved to think about the edges of mountains again,

he turns his face where Mars would be

 

were there no cell to conceal it. 

He misses the lion's black mane, that almost-

 

impossible-to-touch. White scars 

felt in the dark, dry rivers he thirsts 

 

over again and again.

His stomach writhes with love 

 

despite how dangerous 

to touch them. He wakes a gasping.

 

Oh how he misses all the pretty little horses,

shying when the wind brought them 

 

tigers' scent. And when the other inmates

sleep, he touches his ink-etched skin,

 

remembers his wife’s weathered 

hands there, her body eclipsing

 

his. Where was she now—?

Wife in the loose surf, not helpless, but rather, 

 

making a sound that was her sound and impossible 

to break into. He had once woken to find her

 

untangling her hair with her fingers, sleepless, wild-eyed.

Had he wrenched her from the ocean's pit?

 

That little dry sound at the back of her throat...

A sound, turning in on itself

 

the way a seagull lifts its wings ever so

to shed what moisture clings.

 

iii. the bite

When the sheriff saw my shock 

and the black bear’s body—a curled fist—, 

he said, I gave the order. It’s on me, 

as if guilt could be transferred.

He sleeps in one piece, his life lines not stained. 

Pretend, as close as I come to mourn... 

pleas too late and no one but me and my metal arm. 

The bear’s small, almost imperceptible eyes frozen 

 

open. If limestone had ears, if chalk could speak. 

White calcite, I’m in a terrific gap, held in stalactite 

against a painstaking gush of remorse. My life thrown 

into a gallop, a rat’s race. To be a star in frenzy, 

revolving in the precise order of a free-for-all. 

My mind is still swarming over that grass. 

 

Oh stars, little dogs in the sky, your throng 

would floor the song in me, tong, tong,

a metal deadweight sound with 

consequences. When I forget, my curse 

will level me. My eyes, flashing 

backward, will not close again. 

When I killed them, I did it on my knees.

Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, a poet and novelist from Vilches, Chile, is the author of La Pava (Ediciones Inubicalistas). They hold an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University and their poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in West Branch, DIAGRAM, Quarterly West, diode, and other literary journals. They live in Worcester, Massachusetts, and teach creative writing at Clark University. Learn more about their work on their website: mandygutmanngonzalez.com.

Matt Reeck

2 poems

from Adorn Thyself

 

The Heaviness of Life

How beautiful the city!
How ugly!


There on the other side of the street
the mosque, the largest in Asia
a white structure on the street corner remembered from my youth. 
Each time coming up from the subway
the stairs full of people
the big mosque reassures me
reminds me of India
Chhoti Masjid (the Little Mosque) to the right 
on the road in Khurram Nagar (Happy Neighborhood)
telling me I’m almost home.


Here, sidewalks fill with tourists, locals,
young people, their friends. 
It’s Ramadan, the mosque swallows people. 
Men go through the front door into the large hall 
women go to the roof
where families in the apartments surrounding the park 
can watch them, miniature figures,
while they eat their rice or noodles at dinner.

 

All the people entering the mosque are foreigners.
The mosque at the corner of the park, the only park in the city 
outside of the cul-de-sacs of stony land abutting the hills, 
spaces too awkward to be transformed into commerce
or the peak where tourists enjoy the view
the feeling of rising over everything—of dominion.


*

How beautiful the city!
How ugly!


The building, twenty floors. 
Inside its arcade, the Indian tailors. 
The tout outside Indian too, I speak to him, I tell him (in Hindi)
to stop asking me to buy things, doesn’t he recognize me,
and in time he stops, smiles his greeting. 


The people in the elevator speak Hindi
but they don’t speak to each other. 
Then, once, in the elevator at night, two men are speaking. 
“How are you doing, sir?” asks the younger, smaller man. 
“Very well, very well, God is great,” replies the older man 
watching the floor numbers illuminate in ascending order. 
“God is always great!” replies the first. 


Then, over the weekend, from the apartment next to ours, 
songs, the banging of a drum, a bhajan party,
ecstatic melodies, the desire to leave the world. 


*

How beautiful the city!
How ugly!


The trip from the airport too simple,
made easy for commerce. 
The old airport famous for its landings,
suddenly buildings next to the wings, then the tarmac.
That city was dirty, two distinct cities. 
Victoria Island. Then Kowloon
the buildings covered with filth: 
the rain made them moist, the sea brought a salt brine
then the trash thrown from the windows
clinging to the sides of the buildings
congealing in the spaces between 
the apartments like dirty titans emerging from the earth.


But this time, a silent train to Kowloon’s main station 
then a transfer to a bus. 
It’s too simple, a child could do it, a blind person, 
an American tourist.


A man approaches. 
He wears shorts and a T-shirt, a billionaire or no one.
He’s waiting for the bus too. 
In the bus, he recounts his adventures. 
He’s a call center manager in the Philippines. 
From LA. He comes to Hong Kong whenever he can.
“The girls are always nice. When I go on vacation, I never sleep. 
I have one night here. I’ll sleep on the plane home.” 


A commercial city. 
People come to buy
anything capable of being sold 
without prudery. 


*

How beautiful the city!
How ugly!


Before it was here, before the first buildings, 
the first streets, it was just sweaty hills
surrounded by the sea, with islands and pirates in their boats 
sheltering in coves, their boats so agile,
the big vessels, easy prey.


No one dreamed it up at once. 
Not one person.
The city’s every fold, its every hot island. 


On a rooftop balcony bar, a friend of a friend, 
a businessman from Kuwait, says it’s a city without a soul,
not a place to live, it was this way from the start. 
Who knows. 
Now it’s a city of sanitized shopping malls. 
A sign on the marble wall outside one reads, 
“Do not stay here for any reason, for any amount of time.” 
I have a picture to prove it.


*

How beautiful the city!
How ugly!


I go to the café to read. 
A man comes in. 
He approaches me. “Excuse me,” he says, in English. 
He wants to talk. He teaches English in China. 
He talks about his students, his girlfriend. 
He’s almost old. 
He has come to town to buy a certain iPad, I can’t help him 
I don’t know, he gives me his business card. 


*

How beautiful the city!
How ugly!


One Sunday, the park after sunset. 
A little pond with a little fountain, 
no animals, no toy boats, it’s not Paris. 
In the beds, flowers in a botany lesson, 
each plant with a sign announcing its origins
as though people would stop to learn the Latin
wanting to memorize these terms 
for an upcoming test.


The park lamps give off weak light. 
In the half-dark, servants and nannies sit on the sidewalks, 
on the benches, in little groups
listening to their music, brought from afar
laughing quietly, imagining being back at home 
with their loved ones, free of the city’s heaviness.


*

How beautiful the city!
How ugly!


What does it mean to know a person’s face? 
A face changes all the time. 
We recall others in a certain position
but reality isn’t like that.
“How old I look!” we say, when we look at a photo.
Then, one year removed, we think, “How young I looked!” 
We don’t want to leave the world.


To describe the face of a city—
which city? which moment? 
It moves, it breathes. 
Beyond human control.
I look for the same buildings as before, 
they’re there, but not the same. 


Lying on the park bench in the late afternoon 
a long weekend day alone
my friend at the Indian doctor’s posh house on the peak, 
I watch the clouds perspire over the city 
thinking of elsewhere
wanting the separation to be over
wanting another day to elapse 
before memory can begin again.


w/Fatima
Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon
July 2014
just before the protests

 

Clouds Expand in the Sky

 Clouds expand in the sky like the runes of a world unknown. We live beneath the clouds on a plane called terra firma. This land was once a prairie with coast live oaks in the knee-high grass. My two-year-old holds up a white colored pencil and says, “Black.” She holds up a purple pencil and says, “Pink.” If I am to be nothing more than the custodian of Sae Ah’s future, I will be happy. 


*


The frigate bird flies into cumulus clouds on updrafts that last for months. Even while complimenting you, some people make you feel bad. Even while insulting you, some people make you feel good. I couldn’t tell you which is worse. Irby told me I would like A Poetics. Now Irby’s dead, and Bernstein’s a professional poet.


*


“Nothing on Earth resembles clouds so much as islands,” wrote Henri Michaux in Ecuador (1928). The LA Times article featured a young white couple, reportedly artists, who, the article seemed to say, were to be applauded for living in downtown LA and making sure that they had “artistic spaces.” “Kudos to the rich!!” might well have been its title. When we were standing at the corner of Broadway and Ocean in Santa Monica, a Mercedes at the stoplight caught Jane’s eye. It was silver plated, with opaque, tinted windows. My mother exclaimed something, and a young woman in front of us, already taking a picture on her phone, mistook her comment to be praise. She turned her body halfway toward us, and, before she caught up to my mother’s moralizing tone, she said, “That’s a dope car.”


*


When I looked up, the woman sitting next to me on the train had a phone with a screen saver of a blue background with two cartoon clouds. Today people are moving out of their apartments. Solidarity lasted six months. When I asked Lisa to sign one of her books, she wrote “in solidarity” and drew a sun. It made me think of Lech Wałęsa. People try to be good people to people on their same level. I’m on the same level as Sae Ah. When in the bathtub together, she points to my chest, and I say “chest,” she points to my forehead, and I say “forehead,” and when she points to the top of my head, I say, proud that she might be able to understand the concept, the “crown of my head.” 


*


A sentence can organize the world, but so can a stanza; these stanzas are organized by clouds. This morning as soon as she awoke, Sae Ah extended her arms and demanded her strawberry kefir popsicle that we refer to as “ice.” “Aaiith!” she said, smiling, radiant. I picked her up, her torso glued to my chest. I pressed her closer, happy to be alive again. She pointed me to the kitchen, and then to the freezer, saying as we grew closer, “That! That! That!”


*


Cloud County is in north-central Kansas. Its capital is Concordia. Francisco Vasquez de Coronoda came to Kansas in 1541 to search for Quivira where there were “trees hung with golden bells”—the Lost City of Gold. Whenever someone says, “remind me to email you,” I repeat in my mind, “inshallah.” Someday soon I will have a garden the size of a small citadel where I will plant eggplants, cucumbers, zucchinis, and tomatoes. I will surround myself with people I love, and I will feed them the vegetables that I have cultivated. And I will have a fish tank for me and Sae Ah, and if our guests wish to look at them, we will let them.


*


Today there are no clouds. It’s as though someone forgot to decorate the cake before they presented it to the birthday boy. Sae Ah brushes the blue marker across the page and says, “Puddle.” I say, “Draw an ‘h,’” and she scribbles a mess and says, “H.” The man killed his wife, drove cross-country to his old school, then killed his former professor, while we waited, hunkering in the backroom, uncertain of the extent of the carnage.


*


“Once a year clouds pass in the blue sky like hooded pilgrims mumbling to themselves, they never stop here but march on to sacrifice themselves to the sun or hurl themselves into the sea …” writes Frank Wynne, the translator of Boualem Sansal’s The German Mujahid


*


The clouds gather, the sky darkens, and rain falls. My father says that the urge to talk is deeply laid within the human genome, and who would disagree with such a chatty guy? He had called to wish me happy birthday (one day late), and I said, “Thank you. I enjoy hearing it, but I like to move on quickly afterwards.”


*


The sky parted, and a new horizon emerged; the sky pulls its clouds to the side, and the chariot of the sun appears. Everyone complains about everyone talking all the time about the weather, but what of it? The problem is saving the interesting things for those who will appreciate them. 


*


I hope I’m given a cloud in heaven to look at, or lean upon, depending upon heaven’s location. Yesterday before going to sleep, Sae Ah was lying on our bed with her face in our pillows. I put one of Jane’s linen sheets on top of her butt, which she was sticking into the air. “You like the feel of linen, Sae?” I said. “You think we should name your sister Linen?” I asked. “Sae and Linen—does that sound good to you?”

 

 

Los Angeles

 June 2016

 

Matt Reeck was the Princeton Translator in Residence during Spring 2021 and won the 2020 Albertine Prize for his translation of Zahia Rahmani’s “Muslim”: A Novel (Deep Vellum). His poems have recently appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, and Black Warrior. Selected Satire: Fifty Years of Ignorance, his translation from the Hindi of Shrilal Shukla, will be published by Penguin-India in Summer 2021. In 2022, Routledge will publish his book Description/Dispositif on ethnographic aesthetics.

Brianna Johnson

2 excerpts

from In Defense of Abigail Williams

 

Excerpt 1

In Defense of Abigail Williams,


here is her sense of Heat.


Minneapolis 2018

His musculature seemed to have a certain charm, aerial tan bark—his lightness immense from his disquiet. The hard beautiful the reeking white dazzle.




I was I know the sense of death, me and we leaving the table, a glamorous picture. I could also feel a ramble taste, a celebrity whereby I didn’t recognize.


I asked, “how were you planning to kill me?”


“No, not you. But the lady at the next table. I was going to slit her throat. I guess I could’ve slit your throat or smashed your head in the wall.


Pretty fucked up. I’ve talked to other guys think the same.”




I lay very white wild but apart from that I will never be loved. Marlboro superior like white by this and she got up on pictures on the wall. What and see he talks like a town that has lost. They bring you and bawl or I come—I put my eyes to it was alarmed white and green. Was this man not my friend? Indifferently respectful, a breath of cool. Lamentations. Why don’t you take me down, first time, hanging on the dirty white wall? Damn marble black letters. Too big too stone. Tied the end to the bottom of the water too weak to own the earth. My heart was cold when I was wearing glass. Dress cut laughing. I am angry too. So clear and stranger here and not either of us found that out. One of my eyes hostile you are afraid of it. We are like silent reels all white first to go and best to leave. The other side always a moth. Not long ago in the daylight, yes, I am calm. I said, “put the sad things away.”




He was so anxious and came across like a messenger. I hate you you know and against the walk all your friends dead will never see you again. Just you touch me once like you love money. The green that everything around it doesn’t touch. I did not shut from underneath. I felt giddy. The scent of a fixed smile the hot weather the sting of a red ant. Of a break in the blank face.


He was the worst. I could live happy with the worst. If he can keep his mouth shut.




I was in a little war. A little town. You came down and bombed the scrambling noise. All glory would not be struck in the wrong place. Like a paper-cutter slices cellar from cellar—and in it you will know more wind. To the poor bastard among his rat bites, which is confessional, end golden over the satisfied nation. That story where you can speak and be answered by God.




We dig trenches before we’re shot down in them. No one man is a furnace. The bird waits in the egg and speaks upon his marble harmonizing all evil youth. This vision is unfit for building. Mad, sad, what is happening here? I can’t say, more weight upon WHAT CRIME IT IS to be me. Ministers kissed me as I scolded them. Buzz off jabberwocky. It changes to a Saturday evening. Hell itself. And blessedness.




We smile simple felt simple and dismounted quickly. Steam rose off. I had fucked white supremacy. I could tongue across the yard. He couldn’t hurt a fly not a fly throat cut I dared smiling and I forgot this began with the same argument now. A fine machine straight features and so many friends who had died. He was helpless simultaneously rode up saying he loves me and so barely alive he believed that.




I did not love him which I could not tell him for as much as I loved him I could not induce him any further to destroy himself.
Why would I ever want a man to be the father of my children?



The future failing on this floor like nearby water like I never fully emerged before that fertile summer moment. One involvement somehow peripheral. My summer was energy. I had less cause in all as the panic morning makes you sweat. Unrelenting sense of daily routine. Eat with potatoes. Get out of bed. I felt bad I never brought better and eventually lost more. I coasted in a shitty job. I spoke big soft lies. Returning all which is now in the lying translation. I slept in smaller middle eclipses. I stayed the yellow summer. One space, much of the house, just as social every green and violet room. A local house. Land had been cleared, a white moving. Immigration clerical unbalanced well as land to history thing to public use site of many others.



“You said, you couldn’t get pregnant.”


“Why didn’t you take Plan B?”


“If this is to get me to stick around you will never hear from me again.”


But how his cells or while our lying adolescent-like curiosity sucked the things onward in me. I am wearing it. Where has he been? Kuwait Afghanistan Iraq Syria where has he touched with his bare hands himself bombs and loved it, America? What flag- draped coffin?

 

Excerpt 2

Justine


I recall drains in your town and an immediacy of vampire covens. I pass and I can suddenly see the streets lit up from a dollhouse, a teenager in a moneyed motor home. Then I park a moment under the electric light, a laminated hymnal of folding chairs next to a set of hands.




I pass windows but no one hands me the ability. What’s more, Meth-women interested in carrying out the witness, switched on the blood. But it was summer. That’s all it was. And from the road took place the pulpit. God, there were people. Poor—by throngs. Poor and had burned drinking and sniffing. And forget do about fuck-all. Private- nesses or standing invited inside forming naming blessings performing on the internet. The mashing pedals muted their laughter born their ducking shadows.




They had filled one woman they’d established a dump. My God, I memorized his face better than ever and called this rally a freezing silence.




Say I burned up a piston, a cylinder, the crank stops cranking. Begin tearing it down to a spine. Take the pins from their aluminum holes. Check damage. Compression. Seizing. Answer Daddy on how much money I have in the bank. We’ll lose the house, but I will not waste a single cold cupful of methanol. Make it juice, make it spool up from the mouth of the carburetion, breath and combustion. Sleep on the bone fragment you steer with a currency of beer and wonder where we will live next year.




The feeling of being harnessed is catching. Keeps pace with me. Never polite and starting to get to me. I feel most comfortable when the cockpit closes. Cock and bull. A tie-down, tie-me-up, bed. A perpetual hiss of go go go. The men and the boys make sure to spray me in the face as they throttle it in the turn. Wet, never stays long, reminds me how fast I’m going behind that breathing glass.




I have bruises where my arm bones should be. I have welts and eyes of yellow, purple, blue, dimpled blacks on my thighs, knees, my legs have bruises like amoebas, a petri dish.




I drive a bloodstream coming from a tank, plastic red, plastic black, plastic yellow. Burrow into the wake. Why do I have a feeling this marriage is childless? I lay my eggs in batter on the beach. Sucked back into my body like a spitwad. This is the underground. Bloodblooms. Kicks it through the air.




I raced against the pitch, the boys, the sticky stiff oiled crew with grappling hooks and bungee cords on shore. I loved the power I loved the supremacy.




I’m going to lick you now like your mother. I’ve absolutely crushed the lilies to the ground. There’s the deepest black and the deepest green surveying me in curving motions, roving flashbulbs in lighthouses, synchronized swimmers, and stretchers full of handling devices dropping down like men to the concrete. But water when you hit it is unyielding.




I have seen onrushing bellies, a section of the human species on a carousel, screwy metals and mirrors, kaleidoscopes striking circles popcorn carotid caryatid. There are curved brims dumping blood, but he is a drainpipe. He spits on me. It’s a grave not a vermillion bath, somehow a bride of a spill on the floor. It was like to follow the path of tongues. On a experimental altar-



low and look over those slow dictum.





don’t gaslight




I’d be under the house like a worm. The crammed captive audience. And I pushed him in shut. This was when we were inseparable. He was so otherwise open as the doors slid. As I’d known him what he was to which I was frequently. I’m so really fucked up for as long as I’ve dealt in emotional exorcism. Live dark archival reaches



redemptive good—

 

Brianna Johnson received her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Her first book The Axe Lectures was published by Spout Press in 2017 and her second book Drone Fidelity was published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2018. She lives in a small town in Minnesota with a pit bull and some books.

Connor Fisher

6 poems

from Buckshot

Our Parish History

 I pulled the invented thorns from my eyes. I dragged

out every flagellating spike and 

opened myself as far as possible. I 

cast off everything that was not mine. 

I went to Santa Fe. There, I looked at art

from the outside. Always, always from the outside. 

I hurled my glands onto the zealous cushion. I became

Baudelaire and neglected the fountain of puny signs. 

My wife undressed me in a world of pine. She 

glistened with snails, with stepped-on snails.

We lay at right angles and drank wine aged 

in oyster husks. We burned off impossible crumbs. 

The Basilica knew us. It wanted our perfect shells. It 

opened a sacral door. We embroidered ourselves 

with birds and graffiti; we unscrewed from the pale globe. 

 

The Raptured Flesh

A crowd of people formed along the riverbed.

 

Their shared heart pumped velvet clots.

 

Out there, shaking nymphs clustered in their filthy cave.

They clustered in their perverse cave as its walls pulped 

lumps of fat. 

 

Now the rite could commence. The priest flicked his rotting tongues

across the sacrificial blood blade. 

 

I had writhed long enough. I had writhed until my skin chafed and 

broke in fractals of fascia. I had writhed and simpered

against the ropes. I was cocooned. 

 

An evil star chartered above. Its mechanisms flaunted 

infinitude. 

 

The river moves through me as they light the deer fabric. Soon, too

soon, I will clamp the black bolts. I will charter, impossibly, 

the resurrection of my vertebrae.

 

Warsaw

That night I was a cat; I licked cream from city 

 

gutters. My sisters listened to the pulsing vartabed and 

 

swabbed off the rainwater. Their ceiling of bees lowered; 

 

it was a hallmark of ash. That echo. That echo, 

 

inconclusive, haunting, joined to the black upright. 

 

There was distant factory thunder and my observations grew

 

indiscrete. Red cardinals slunk underfoot. October will be warmer.

 

Sounds flirt. They percolate. Long landscapes

 

of anxiety make their mark on highways; tractor tracks mingle with 

 

black grain-sloughs; train rails are sturgeons of the Great Plains. Now 

 

I’ve exhausted the last of the images. Now I am high 

 

in the mountains. It’s quiet. The eerie pika squeals. Marmots end their vision.

 

I lay my head on the dictionary. It purrs. It heals me. 

 

Sacred Verve

A velvet antler climaxed. An ornament was born. Its other heir, the bee, needled its way through a collection of verbs. I atoned for the omitted chrysalis ritual with hands clipped short. Sedated apes settled under a drizzle. The lapsed omnivore swung its effusive braid. 

 

Her story began, “Vents formed in the flaming underbelly of the salamander.” It grew a sibling from scrapes of grass. It bluffed listless eons of pollen.

 

I wept as I read it. My scaled eyes inverted. I kept vigil against corrupt acid flows. I held the sacred verve until the radiated eggs morphed into its only surface. They ripened to hatch.

 

Report from the Last Appalachian Palace

My machinery has a terrible horse 

in its hinge. 

My machinery nicks its lonely fingers

in the razor blade screed of a modular helmet.

I antecede through an hourglass.

 

The trees mimic ordinary sassafras. 

My hand mimics the wings of

someone else’s dove drifting through 

the soul’s unknown commonwealth.

 

There is no ash in my mouth, no ash on 

my calcified tongue. From the balcony, from

the inside of religion’s impossible dictionary,  

I looked out on a countryside of fictions. 

It was already half eaten. 

 

Hello; the windows are all painted. Hello; I’ve

seized the electrons in the dusky barrel 

of my silhouette. Open it. Don’t 

open it. It fingers like a gun.

 

Desert Thrashers

I think this is a photograph. I think you are in it. A woman slouches in the saddle. The flat top of a mesa scratches against cloudless blue. In and out of her horse’s lungs, the southwest air forms a clear, convincing math of things. It’s a question of shape, of curiosity at the way juniper and pinyon scrub look outward for a definition of a formal ending. 

 

Coyotes are vagrants. Nomads cross rust-colored train tracks. They depart, puffed and monstrous with gaucho spirit and return with the winter. They have wandered entire regions.

 

Her saddlebags bulge with coins. They carry a private economy. She trades through settlements. Money rustles against sand, tamped down by wheels. Cattle roll over it in their sleep. At night bats flutter through, impotent as men. They leech electric zigzags from fields of sifting ash. Desert thrashers chirp over a wagon mound. The zest of their orange eyes. 

 

A desert shines in the photograph. It’s stretching out, spreading like wings to the edge of the image. Each oasis is a crucifix. A lame plane: granular sand where sidewinders compress the night. The rider is about to blink; her eyes reflect moonlight through tears. And the horse nostrils quaver. They announce the coming of insidious sandstorms; the tearing open of pure emotion pressed out like oil from saddlebags. 

 

Connor Fisher is the author of four chapbooks including The Hinge (Epigraph Magazine, 2018) and Speculative Geography (Greying Ghost Press, forthcoming 2021). He has an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English from the University of Georgia. His poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Typo, the Colorado Review, Tammy, Posit, Cloud Rodeo, and the Denver Quarterly.

Lisbeth White

4 poems
from “The Asking Pool”

Bridge (they think I am Dutch)


They think I am Dutch here: another caramel-something picturesque in this Netherlands city park amidst the weaving bicycles and willows weeping over the duck pond.
Because eventually diaspora relocates origin. Because mixed ancestry mixes it up everywhere. I am addressed in Dutch as much as in English.  In French.  In Spanish. No one can guess how to speak to me.
If I could speak all the languages, still I will always be most afraid I will never be able to say how it is. The world moves through me.  I learn to copy the voices of others and live within their masks.  
The truth is I’m nostalgic for a beingness unmarkable. A bodyscape un-delineated. A landscape unmapped. Unmappable. Recognized simply, by tree, by evening light, by direction of wind in grasses. A landscape intimate with secret monikers, known only by the one who utters the calling. Precious as it sounds when I cup my palm before my mouth, when I speak into my hands my own name.

 

Bridge (to an empire)


At first, all I can think and feel are how far away the lands of worry.  How juvenile, the US of A, fractured by its rampant loss.  
Look how clean and simple this white cup and saucer by comparison.  How long an afternoon spent at a cafe on the square. 
I admit there is an ease to which I stretch my days, a matter of factness in procuring diversion, one task at a time.
Now, I am wandering the curved street.  Now, I am taking a hot chocolate near the park.  Now, I am watching the canal move its water.
How languid a land can be when blood is secondary: the fruit for this warm drink cut from bodies far away, soaking an earth just as fabled into distance.
But not this dirt beneath the wire-footed cafe chair.  
And not my body. For once, not my body.
It is so easy to believe it. Effortless as time built on another continent.  
I love it, I do-- the chocolate creamy enough to thicken my tongue.

 

Bridge (of longing) 


I am leaving autumn in Belgium. I am coming to autumn in New York. I am dropping with the cool air, leaves of light fluttering to concrete. Then goes the hope for the year, the high heated possibilities of spring and summer pass away on this train to the airport.
Did I get close enough to the sun this time around?
The grey mist outside the train soothes the edges off the city.  
Yesterday I went to St. Baaf’s 7th century abbey and saw a photo exhibition of refugees from every place in the world.
Medieval tabulatures of prayer. Dust and plastic camps in valleys of nowhere.  Sanctuary. The ripping reach towards it.
I am here, on the rock of this train, wishing for a place to lay my head.  Rhythm. Warm earth. Quiet water.  Hands to cup the round of my skull.  Thumbs to stroke my forehead from eyebrow to temple, calm as clockwork.  
Will she always be with me, this small tremoring behind my heart, this dull ache to be cared for as a child?
Be lost, I want to tell her.  Be sorrowful.  Be set upon by longing.  Let it be a bridge we can speak across. Let it be the longing that carries us forward.
But who is saying this and who is listening?
I don’t know which land I am writing from.

 

Bridge (of blood)


I will tell you the truth:  I came here looking for ancestors.  I came here in this black body with white ancestors, this white body with black ancestors, this brown body, to find an apology within it.  I am responsible for them, don’t you see? We belong to each other.

 

A lover of the earth and wanderer of lands, Lisbeth White is an alumna of VONA, Bread Loaf Environmental Conference, Tin House and Callaloo Creative Writing workshops. Her writing has been published in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Rumpus, Kweli, Apogee, Blue Mountain Review, The Fourth River, Yemassee, the anthology Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California from Scarlet Tanager Books, and elsewhere. She is co-editor of the anthology Poetry as Spellcasting: Literary Conjure for Personal and Collective Transformation, forthcoming from North Atlantic Books in Fall 2022. You can find her digitally at www.lisbethwrites.com or Instagram: @earthmaven.

Emma Train

5 poems
from A Spreading Out, Like

TIME’S BUYING SICKNESS

I am sick with the Time’s buying sickness. 
—Lorine Niedecker


The old people talk 
about late spring 
storms, swap eggs
for asparagus    
This, they say, is 
some of what it looks like

But what of this dog eared
month…I’ve existed without
knowing its rules, but that
the color your body plies under hot water

Aborted end of summer    Don’t go
I think I’ve been here before    Left to waste then over pasture

Clothesline pressures the grass back to seed
and a tomato plant opens
its cage 
sweating in need 
of a known natural 

Can’t you tell
I need you to understand
her memories     almost going
one son with
the cartridges and the other off with the lights 
tight around the well
they all own one side of the road and an attic weasel won’t let sleep

I’ve passed the thought experimented
aneurysm, shucking garbage
bags full of clothes, finally

finding the right man
to fix the leak, five meters of copper 
laid by a dead neighbor son and there’s 
the thing, here’s the thing:

an apparent sun buttering the
field over this noon hour

Projector taut time and its avoidance 
these summers one comes back 
translucent 
suitcase 
zipper sealed

 

IN THE MIND OF LIMITED ABATEMENT

What else to liken yourself to but an animal, the ruminant kind?
—Claudia Rankine


Three deer moan an unfree 
Three crosshairs bait

What else? What else constitutes the 
good life? Sometimes you think like 
the deer must, in the mind
of limited abatement. Shush.

Indefinite sprawl    the trunk hemmed field 
look through sunglasses
through the scope. Iterate 
a (free) being been
unmarked     for when marked 
we are scored by crescents, 
finally hashed into color

What else? Else we decide life
constitutes itself, desire
forecloses itself to a pinpoint

Wilding, wild wait        let go    come 
on     Wait 
now you know what 
I’m talking about
from the field once desert
there is something 
here vandalizing me    it creeps

You find out ruminant 
is a category of being, of nutrient stasis. Chew it 
over again; let’s do
it over again. Liken yourself
to an animal, to a gender, the slow kind,
the kind that sleeps 
standing, the kind with
eyes in the back, with a will 
to drop          its neck.

 

OF LOVE MAYBE 

I am lucid now, come see me
and my family, flush against the stoop

Like a tree in the shade, too
clever

And the photographs? no longer
off to war, none on another continent. The division 
went over,
all parties agreed, each following
their own
life’s work, far from over here

She will be the first
to dole low. Don’t refuse
empathy, there is no grey. There is always a
spaniel waiting
and virgin ivy


I will never know history
Doors close. At night,
I can’t ask


Of love maybe or
worship


Count them up

 

TRANSLATION

That place was so clean    you take 
a train from down town 

suburban hills 
take a couple hours        the facades are perfect

I used to go to the city when I was younger
you see that bit
       of white? The first 
tooth, oh my god

The previous owner
was a woodchipper, took
months to cart it all 
away        and shavings 
still get stuck to sheets
to socks   
I’ll go make dinner 
chicken and pomegranate 

you’ll be okay     someday 
you’ll need nothing 

 

PLAGUE JOURNAL

Speech is always in excess of poetry as print is 
always inadequate for speech. A word sets im-
ages flying through the brain from which au-
guries we recall all extent and intention. I’m not
a poet because I have nothing to give life to
make it due, except my attention. And I don’t 
know if my wounded sort is enough. People 
probably do hear watches go tic-tok. But I’m 
sure my childhood clock went tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-
tic-tic…Why do I recall this in a city without
time? What hairy men find on their bodies is
amazing.
—Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren

::::

in the devasted city
as far as I can throw
your good reasons 
kill promise’s 
stillborn truths

::::

in the divested city 
death has nothing to do

with salt or water 
peace-white gulls 

notarize the boulevards    the fugitive laundry
the barricaded water rooms 

machine-can headlines
tin-can conflagrations 

retained on interview
The New News:

for lack of finding
what is there

Manfolk search
O kiki who are you

::::

sustainable day noirs the sky
blue cancers the sky

::::

blinds up blinds down
good fences go make good neighbors 

and their baby in their stroller 
and their dog tied to their stroller
and a balloon tied to their baby
gently buffers any incidence 
of wind and a securely installed swing swings gently 
from backyard oak

fine line between inspiration and fear 

this tight kitchen    

::::

in the quarantined city
no weather
but the golem 
of time

::::

Daily consuming 
snow aesthetic

Icelandic cop shows
Finnish cop shows
and their 2 cup 
coffee nap lighting

a whole mini town in on
globalization’s eco crisis

The Left Hand of Darkness
a whole season allegory 
for a whole planet 
a whole planet allegory 
for a whole knowledge 
a whole knowledge allegory 
for queer love 
almost not quite 

how many words for “ice”
how many words for “hormonal 
cycle” in a fictional 
language never written 
only invoked

::::

Nicole the weather 
woman: “large
cone of uncertainty”

::::

feel weight 
of own 
tit in 
right hand

co
signed 
gender 

or do I mean genre

::::

black T
shirt on floor
thinks it is animal

dog is my god is 
dog a god like 
if god’s dog 
historian were
just tenured

crumpled shorts
on floor 
laugh at fall

::::

in media res
this city 
and its 
new wave
of cancer alleys

this city filmic 
this city anaphylactic
this city archaic 

“I refuse to conform
to this way of life!”
yells a woman 
at the Circle K

::::

in the deciduous city
thirty day’s first rain 

bricks of atmosphere
hung by cheese cloth 

headline: TOOTHPICK SHORTAGE

::::

August’s center pushes one oh five
everywhere a new streak counter 
rainbow everything    rainbow for sale

dogs and/or cats
colorful death charts 

The Container Store: Yes, 
we’re open!

The Mattress Store: Yes, 
we’re open!

The Lightbulb Store:
“Have a bright day!”     the man says 

to the eleven dollar lightbulb 
wondering if repetition makes
the joke more feasible  

::::

in the city 
un nameable
nine a.m.
boiling 
riot riot riot

::::

heat chunks the week’s
elevator shaft morality

I want to be alive
you say outloud (boisterously)
to week whatever

economists have fallen
in love with the pathetic
fallacy 

::::

me in my velocity box
& them: new man on the corner
each day: a new sign
for a different kind of acceleration

me, off to buy some pint
glasses, some vegetarian 
sausages 

later, smoking inside 
your only form 
of redress

:::: 

the old capitol bleaches
description’s limit 

less cantilever 
than will

like how survival
doesn’t want miserable life

storming the rain 
in No’s universal lingua 

frankly if no man is an island
then where is the sea

jetting bridges 
to present situation 

::::

Where grammar is 
already (again) 
corrected 

::::

pirated whispers 
glance off
the artificial lake 

subdivision 
subdivide 

this view
north east south west

their names 
gregarious 
with pride 

::::

L: “Why all these     water towers?”

Maybe a painter?

Fixer upper in Manor

::::

latest investment swings evil
“where does all the dog shit go?”

an appropriate amount of take-out
all night long: trains

::::

another day another dollar

“Mass fatality incident”

slow, maybe

::::

No more masks! No more mythologies!

::::

Here     silence profaned
no cease the ashed doves

Night cousins our crickets’ fuses
and not yet you    that night

Light and definitely night
definitely I    
hear them now

Campagnard prodigals!
broken clock’s worth of coco puffs

Hem of the sea        fucking
how do you do that

 

Emma Train is a poet from Berkeley, California. A graduate of UC Davis’s MFA program in creative writing, she is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is writing a dissertation on contemporary queer ecopoetics. Her poetry has appeared in the Colorado Review, the Berkeley Poetry Review, and is forthcoming in Grist. She was most recently a finalist for the 2020 Omnidawn Open Book Prize and a finalist for Interim’s 2020 Test Site Poetry Series.

Katherine Factor

4 poems
from A Sybil Society

Katherine is a 2020 winner of the Test Site Poetry Series Book Contest

Mistress of Honey


I do I do

live in
dream time

thoughts consumed
by the mystery

wherein the mute
can hear both
a distant noise

& a subsuming
declaration

or any emerging
note

an antibacterial
skin seal
from the mom canal

Did the pastors know
if they spent

any significant
mind sleeping

that the living
would convert

& don shirts
of a pleated     & mtn’d
cognition

a habit as incongruous
     as the pineal expulsion
when dreaming

a model
of the groin
 in the dose

Did they plan
for the symbol

avatars to
discover
the keyhole
& stick fingers
in it

flicking
a switch
as we subsist
w/in the mini veils

We smushed
up on the access
holographic
of the idea itself

the battery in hand
gelid at first—

then a bee
shaking its pollen
leg pouch

after it
entered the center

gently inserting
nectar into
an office

like a word
makes mud

mutable
for the nest
by vibrating

 

Tripod Lockdown


Celibacy is my zone guys
fasting alone
via literate hoodlums

supported by loam sisterhood
scholars will wander
at the elevated vulva.

Bow to appalling instrument
or a plectrum
that makes speech

& applaud earth with gawkers
so I may be upright
on the hyped-up tripod

that emanates herb fumes
the pneuma tithing either
as gas or water.

Plutarch thought
emissions
weaken wordplay
but I am dancer sweet
& my sweat stature
blazes the turntable.

Watch my lips hit the pipe—
whoa it razzles my crotch
wherein cradled in the mtnscape
thesauri dot
future stairways.

 

Mycenae, Founded by Fungi


My throat sends an alert.
The mushroom picker has come.

Thirsty, he will make his pruning hook a divining rod
shaking it all the way to the citadel.

The site a sight.
A citation of the city’s ages & usages.

Beneath that, my subterranean spring adores a discovery
for it to flush & flow once more.

When Perseus confronts the mooing sisterhood, we hiss & moo.
A pentatonic scale, the lowing of the cattle our sound.

We call the moon down, relatedly Io.
This type of plucking will be conducive to his purse.

Depending on the substrate, the matter & habit
determine how much bloodletting will ensue.

The lions indicate a femaleness.
A foreign name refound the town:

Mystae, even. Mykes in Greek.
Mukānai, Mykenes, My keys.

Willingly I let go of my head.
I may never forgive the man

who faltered & fulfilled his oracle,
he who let the cap fall off his own head.

Visions of the city all around him.
His thirst a replacement for wonder.

 

Helmet Dressing Room


once the objects said
vote for the proper codes

my outer triangle
insisted on
advancing a shell

so yo
spiral yr own

axis from plane
to pupil

may-eye
follow you back

ditching crowns
but what about
yr pinecone

noose of
ripped diamonds

crip up dimension
to let it shine

let it shrine
this little tetrahedron

of mine

 

Katherine Factor is an editor and educator that has read poems at the Nevada Test Site. She earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa and has held writer-in-residence positions at Idyllwild Arts Academy and Interlochen Arts Academy. She is a recipient of grants from the Iowa Arts Council and the Arts Enterprise Laboratory for publishing young writers. Her poems and audio work exist online and in print at The Conversant, WFMU, Wave Composition, Quarterly West, Poets for Living Waters, DIAGRAM, the Colorado Review, and Coldfront’s Poets off Poetry. The author of Choose Your Own Adventure's Spies: Mata Hari, Spies: Harry Houdini, and Spies: Spy for Cleopatra, more about her can be found at katherinefactor.com.

Stephanie Berger

4 poems
from Femme D’Interieur

Stephanie is a 2020 winner of the Test Site Poetry Series Book Contest and the winner of the inaugural Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award in Poetry

AS IF I HADN’T JUST UNDRESSED INSIDE HER


In the bathtub, of course
I’m in the bathtub 
practically asleep
with the water
like bedsheets, twisted up 
until I am a great big knot
a lie made of linen, the sum 
of each small stitch
I am developing a pattern
on the surface, I sense 
a dead fish, its fleeting 
life, having known only 
this world of sea & land 
was the mystery. My mother 
in the kitchen with 
hips like canyons
bringing new bread 
into the world. In 
the bathtub, I welcome 
sailors home, I speak 
a language only porcelain 
knows, her thighs
like two coasts, she pretends
to be shy, she pretends 
she doesn’t understand 
she is a woman, weeping 
like a child for anyone 
who will listen, for strangers 
who are dying, I am cotton 
in the morning & the tombstones 
line up badly like teeth 
in my bassinet mouth
as the future circles 
just above. 

 

IN PAINTINGS WE APPEAR IN FORESTS IN THREES


The verdict distributed its measures 
throughout the chambers 
of her house like a waltz
& in my heart, I wanted to 
dance to the sentence: 
                       Courage, 
madame. Everything shall be taken 
from you — your daughters, your kingdom, 
your palace & your riches, the dreams
& illusions of your girlhood. Your freedom 
cannot console you now.
                    Now I grow old 
& I seem to grow paler & by the shade 
in the hollow I forget
          her name.
Unbearably beneath the falling 
leaves, she offers to draw me 
 a circle 
with her untrained hand, & the earth 
stops to be given its form. 
                 A daughter
presents a meditation on death
& domesticity, rape & memory, 
presents you with a partition 
between them & on it,
                               a portrait 
of your world. There are women
in the picture whose names you
will never know. I am present 
with them & still dancing, as 
with so many daughters 
buried in the paint beneath 
the gazebo of sheets.

 

EVEN I, WHO HAVE NO LOVER, LOVE 


Bitter & jealous as a demi-
goddess, she pours from herself the 
nectar of her being, becomes a vessel 
for children, the bitch in the sun. 
She is statuesque. I know my devotion 
is difficult to understand; so too
is the language she speaks. Nothing
could stop me from kissing her cheeks 
again & again, wearing away at the 
stone, but soon they are sunken, 
so warped that when she falls 
asleep on her side, moisture 
collects there in a small pool 
that we can drink from.

 

PREFACE TO THIS EDITION AT DAYBREAK


In this version, a giant yellow monarch 
takes to the sky, as the seawalls 

go up & the water rushes down 
her thigh. In the futility of trying to be 

fine, our lady of the immaculate 
conversation floods the city 

with a single word, burns it down 
with a vowel. To be clear  

she is not me, nor am I 
her & this isn’t a reality. It is simply 

a scenario to consider. In this
edition, she has three subjects:

fur — specifically sable, ermine & 
chinchilla. In Lady Windermere's 

Fan, Wilde understands these 
nuances of a personality as 

a privilege one never earns. 
Still, I’m glad we had dinner, 

for tomorrow, we must starve. I have 
sat too long at many tables 

with this woman, weaving letters 
to her lovers in the epistolary air, like 

a dragonfly. With an obscene & unnatural 
thinness, she removes inches from her 

waist through sheer insanity. As I 
disappear, I always wonder if 

somewhere the fruits of my labor are ripe 
for the taking, but I know it is tough 

to find a temperate climate, let alone 
live in it. It is difficult to find your way 

back to the house when you sit 
with your back turned to it. I was there

in that room where she would live 
out her martyrdom, where a devoted 

coterie of monkeys once in a blue 
moon would carry her in her armchair 

to the church, where she would take 
her lovers, awe-inspiringly 

religious, the heroine of many
a strange story, unlikely as being 

chased up a hill by a rattlesnake, 
but still — worth considering. 

Embrace the lying child 
within. She has the curse.

 

Stephanie Berger is the co-founder and CEO of The Poetry Society of New York and co-creator of The Poetry Brothel, The New York City Poetry Festival, The Typewriter Project, and Milk Press. Stephanie earned an M.F.A. in Poetry from the New School, taught in the English Department at Pace University, and has published two poetry chapbooks: IN THE MADAME'S HAT BOX (Dancing Girl Press) and THE GREY BIRD (Coconut Books). Learn more at stephanieberger.com.