G. C. Waldrep

Exodus

—after Jean Dubuffet

You could have said flame but you did not.
You could have said roof but did not.
You could have said light-bearing roof
beneath which a house crouches
you could have crushed pearls into powder
you could have struck a match.
You could have said prayer but you did not.

Twombly

parallel descending motions
“insatiable little gardens”

a machine holds the tongue
by its root

 

it’s you, you’re the machine

—line 2 is quoted from Friederike Mayröcker, Études, trans. Donna Stonecipher

Poor Souls’ Light

where & what is green
the bone strikes, honeycombed
frost-crowned perigee
 

 
the womb has no bone
runs the thief’s rhymed ecology

& therefore no secret solace
 
 
 
I profess my blue coin
in the tine-orchard, my book
set into the crux
of the most ancient testimony

G.C. Waldrep’s most recent books are feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and The Earliest Witnesses, forthcoming from Tupelo and Carcanet (in the UK) in January 2021. Newer work has appeared in APR, Poetry, Paris Review, New England Review, Yale Review, Iowa Review, Colorado Review, New American Writing, Conjunctions, etc. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University and edits the journal West Branch.
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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.