Jared Stanley

Air is Normally Invisible

 

Oh, little dawn pavilion, how you yawn and grin

 

there’s a green catch of light your eyeglasses get

 

basic enthusiasms where the flowering grasses nod in the wind

 

another cruel ongoingness

 

fell asleep with a cock-shaped bookmark on my eyes

 

the sea is off somewhere by itself

 

previously unimagined inhabitants of spume

 

blood in your mouth did you taste it

 

Air is Normally Invisible

 

A king wants to slit the clouds with his fingernail

 

I teach the kid to eat tubers and avoid roads

 

it won’t help when things get serious

 

snow melts in the gaps between pavers

 

we touch the ground like that, a faint scent (cool)

 

born in peacetime, fooled by permanence

 

let’s point a phone at the planets:

 

in a blurry picture, they touch on the lip of the horizon

 

Air is Normally Invisible

 

On Saturday my son lost his sense of smell

 

it had no public meaning

 

on Monday my son

 

the song’s all unstrung

 

thin wire in the wind

 

lungs in Pompeii, lungs in plaster

 

crack the window enough to let him

 

glide through on a hairstreak’s back

 

Jared Stanley has had an unremarkable career as a low-level official, poet, and artist. He has written a few books, including EARS and Shall.
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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.