Rich Ives

Slowly Revealed Clock Shape Circling

your body moused onto
the cooled domestic floor
anterior to the body of
other boldly or in
a slow doll of reason
another touch-recovery project
someone good enough for that
one torn opportune morning
the smooth colossal shout of joyous terror awoke there
stomped right on out of the old
told memory’s odd
chromosomes offered otherwise
overwrought stories
stone codes cold with
slough of commodities
taken home no one told
of simple overglow
ogling ontological vertigo as one might have thought
one should not pocket
without postponement the
obbligato of one’s
effort since one might topple this
the serious flooding
swooning pornographic
soon-to-be posthumous
in its last full song or merely toad it
mooned over into one more coded room of other-loss
so now love’s fond old bodywagon
rolls its old ode to the long stone
short frontier circled late
swooning and holed up
stooping low
outside its own
at rooster crow
in cold memory again

 

 

 

 

Several Islands Have Appeared and Swimming Is Possible

Let’s say there wasn’t
let’s say my sisters
hello and goodbye
but sometimes
we just waited
every direction at once

and the moment had
a gang of them
and it knew something
but it didn’t
admit I wanted to
and I didn’t want it to leave me

any other way
stood by the river and waved
it was all the same
it dropped its leaves and
sometimes it pointed
without going

only its way with me
made up one
I didn’t
understand each other I
know them
alone

 

                 my stories come back marked not at this address or moved and owes me money or try another riverbank or no one even vaguely resembling this has ever lived here and the wind’s hot hand begins reaching beneath the earth’s freshly woven clothing after a season of distance and cool brushing

                 domestic geese nervous about the sunshine after so much gray shake it off like the dust of an old attic while the turtles shuffle onto the bobbing driftwood climbing over each other to let light dry them their little bundled piles of white turd drying to paper and dreaming wondering what they can’t remember

I had to wait for something outside       
after something inside               
the distance was greater than           
the breadcrumb trail               
picked up and                   
happy with himself               
to come in
had gone out
before
my thoughts had been
swallowed by a crow
and the unexpected way the world provides

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shaking Hands with Children

There’s a dish of them okay           

still there’s no excuse               
tall and tall again               
silly                       

already there’s pale smoke           
from the limbs of               
fuzzy white pimples               

there’s exuberance careening           

the children are singing:           
it fits under the door               
what do you think of that           

hand’s opposing whale           
between longer thinner           
fish that can’t live that way           

like the children’s nose game           
extending his flesh               
prongs                       

at the most promiscuous airports       
magical sawed                   
no longer themselves               

with no lid

fat enough as
their beanstalks breach
clouds of hope

blossoming
the cherry tree
popping each day open

like a reckless polka

The light loves the floor
but the dark is fat
and here’s the adult

breaching
less cuticled
there between and poking out

there’s a father
shovel’s flexible sensitivity
there are parents

remembering
children half waking
and touching

 

Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Dublin Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. In 2011 he received a nomination for The Best of the Web and two nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net. He is the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. His book of days, Tunneling to the Moon, was serialized with a work per day appearing for all of 2013, and is appearing again through 2014, at Silenced Press.
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About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.