Nam Hoang Tran

Five Erasures

 

“Primal”

 

 

“Child Memories”

 

 

“No Man’s Land”

 

 

“Scale of Magnitude”

 

 

“Wonder Years”

 

 

Nam Hoang Tran is a writer and photographer based in Orlando, FL. His work appears or is forthcoming in Bending Genres, Midway Journal, BlazeVOX, New Delta Review, Diode, Tilted House, and elsewhere. Find him online at namhtran.com.

 

Laura Moriarty

from rapt glass (detail)

Which Walk 0

re:assemblance

“Take a walk”
—Yoko Ono, WALK PIECE

and look out
as the broken world

breaks again
drawn to bits (I am)

deranged           iota              jot

flakes                 of fixed

whatnot

mechanisms meant
to broach when and where

to find or feel
a finite set with infinite

limitations as when
feast, fetish, or metonymic

gesture connects a personal
system with reference

to civic locality as
streets’ vocal

versions of themselves,
when what is heard

is seen, gleaned,
recollected, and erected,

luck, self-
defined, becomes us,

bent into position feeling to find

beads           balls           brass           steel

nailed                      screwed

scaled up                          run out

resurrected, inwardly

directed to
arrange and play
as we (rapt)
are carried off,

untroubled by resemblance,
guiding principle, or epistemic

framework, though having those,
while making these directed

acts of storage strutted,
glutted, taken up, as I/we

reaching back
to owned devices,

feel free, imaginary,
and tactile as the shudder

of daily acquisition,
domestic, timebound,

vexed by practitioners,
whose practice

like ours,
a consummation,

is thrown up and out
as the poison

presence of each entrance
of nonlife into life

twists            loops                  moves

circles         spits         and splits

giving                                       into

walking while

compromised by things
aging in place

as matter hardened to its
constituents is what

we find when we amass and
detach the past of an object
from its fate creating
an elegy for each fact,

used or not, whose provenance,
always one of loss,

rejection, and subsequent
stooping to find (oneself) with

items grounded by chance, labor
or the erasure of same

becomes stuff subject
to words like reality

adding up
to what we want:

an engine of past time,
creation, and abstraction

whose apparatus
reflects the precision of

wrapped          glass

collapsed         threading         through

the fastness

of everything as everything
found or findable

resolves into action

 

from rapt glass

 

Which Walk 5

the maid real

“Old Woman, your eye searches the field like a scythe!”
—Robert Duncan, “The Structure of Rime VI”

like a sigh, permitted or not,
these visits to Mira Vista

Field            fair            farm            (or look see

place)            which            with

walking               later

renounces            renunciation

the better to incantate as
phrase after praise betrays
the visible day to the visible

night today singing what can you say,
moment by movement, or see

worried, wise, amazed—
heard, herded, heralded, crazed

by this old epithet, rule, and designation

of hags for which read old
women whose presence
absent to some,

purely physical to others, despite being where
and what they/I, are required to be, go, say,

and know            noting            how

dreamed of            mental            meeting

protocols in the form of songs and knowledge
combine the known with the read, said,
intoned, and suggested,

along with the berries there, also
red, thorns with which to be bled,
leave one stepping out attired

with gown, crown, and scythe
clearing what has died into

what is born by the poem of the mind
including words not me but mine

while I, menaced by remembered threats,
summon my ways and those of my actual

mother, Mae Belle Reynolds,
to push in and back out while
hatted, masked, cloaked, fraught

being with her (withered) wrought

where            belief            relief

knowing            & going            are brought

along with these steps at the feet of which lay

we, reconfigured into us, who
write what is read, said, and

displayed, resolving the “made place”
into the made real day

 

from rapt glass (sketch)

Which Walk 6

problem of reversible time

“. . . which am I?”
—Rumi, The Essential Rumi

who (exigene)
portends to redeem

exigencies of a woman
and man in a van when

our names meant light, knight, air, and ones who fly (are flown) when you,
Sufi, carpenter, botanist, and me, writer, waitress, artist of cards and
fortunes, later lose our clothes on the way to losing our minds and hearts
(mine) in a known place where written as played

a woman much withered, a maid
a maiden with a wand a handsome
maid, a white wand with a peacock of
solid gold on its tip

(we) submit
to the reversible fortunes

of muscle memory and the
illusive person in the poem

including types of knowing as when

The Land That Time Forgot
or trip into symbolic space

whose            trace            discloses

beauty            at intervals            as            (not)

lucid            eyes

of mind remain blind to the
inevitable arrangement’s

transformation of attitude,
and altitude calculable only from

the surface or search image
of a specific person

whose comparative anatomy
comes into play when the algorithm

leads us farther into the past—
but if this is the solution

please explain the bones
in the ghost story of the other
lover or the card games there.

Bring in Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale

and other extinction events.
It was crazy for anyone to try

to cross the Sierras in October.
What happens next as we

decohere among the hominins (despite
the abstraction, attraction, and object lessons)

is anybody’s guess.

 

untitled

Which Walk 7

what and who

A dark day finds
heart’s head hatted

and masked with crime
being read into its head

as descent into the local hell

means taking in the ashy
remains of everything with

each breath a reckoning, each step
the mistake of not sheltering in place

while            elsewhere            breath

taken            fills

the same head with fresh despair
of the deadly situation where seconds

become minutes then
centuries where the dead lay
with vast fires closing in

but not here or not yet as
trying for a semblance

of thought            as active            leveraged

expression            of fair

weather’s            familiar

talk while reassembling the same
everything in head’s heart

of later air clear for now

though nothing is better
except if it is when

kinds of crime rhyme
what is wrong (but present)

with what (and who) are gone

 

untitled

symmetry
  

Are there two lines because there are two feet, hands, eyes? Maybe. This walking and making is a process, a procession. When she called an earlier book Symmetry she meant to dismantle this concept with each gesture. Is this that? she wonders, but suspects it is not—as, falling endlessly forward, she moves through space like a sound or a bird. A need for trust occurs. Balance. Emptiness. You can’t think about every step, but you should, she worries. Situational awareness. A military term. A thing is exact. Or exactly not. Intentional. Intended. Once her project was something like courtly love but now she feels betrothed to her work.

The woman stares at herself in the mirror. She makes self-portraits less because of an interest in self than because she is her only model. She enjoys drawing her wrinkles because they add texture. Me and not me, she is simply a thoughtful arrangement of phrases, lines, and planes—scribbled hair.

—from Which Walks

Laura Moriarty was born in St. Paul, MN, and grew up in Cape Cod and Northern California. She attended the University of California at Berkeley. She was the Director of the American Poetry Archives at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University for many years. She has taught at Naropa University and Mills College. She was Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution for two decades. She won the Poetry Center Book Award in 1983, a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry in 1992, a New Langton Arts Award in Literature in 1998, and a Fund for Poetry grant in 2007. Her most recent book is Personal Volcano from Nightboat. Which Walks is forthcoming from Nightboat. She lives in Richmond, CA.

Francesco Levato

from SCARLET

Margot
Barcode, Notepad, Hospital Bracelet
Hell-On
Caffè Macchiato, Cloth Napkin
Three Neck Distilling Flask
Flag on Pole, Inert
Artist’s Statement

 

SCARLET began as a digital visual/poetic meditation on the fractured state of psyche induced by extended social isolation under COVID-19 lockdown. The project has since evolved to document the social disruption of the pandemic as we move through its various mutations and surges.

The digital/visual poems are created through erasure of the novel The Scarlet Plague collaged with glitched imagery from everyday life during the pandemic. The titles of poems in the series are then derived from objects contained in each glitched still life.

Glitching is a technique that introduces errors into the code of a digital file or stream that distorts its presentation. The error-induced fracturing of images in SCARLET is intended to defamiliarize everyday objects and surroundings to reflect the psyche under the constant stress of the pandemic.

The Scarlet Plague is a post-apocalyptic novel by Jack London, published in 1912, set in California during the year 2073, after the world’s population is decimated by an uncontrollable pandemic.

Francesco Levato is a poet, translator, and new media artist. Recent books include SCARLET (forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil in 2023); Arsenal/Sin DocumentosEndless, Beautiful, Exact; and Elegy for Dead Languages. He holds an MFA in Poetry, a PhD in English Studies, and is an Associate Professor of Literature & Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos.

Ben Miller

from Make

SPREAD 17 (LEARN TO LIVE / WITH THE MIND YOU HAVE / LEARN TO LIVE)
SPREAD 18 (FORGET THE MELODY / REMEMBER THE HARMONY)
SPREAD 19 (THE DECAF COFFEE IS WORKING)
SPREAD 20 (STATUE HONORING / THE STANZA / YET TO BE WRITTEN)

SELECTED NOTES ON MAKE

While the preceding poetic territory relies on the insistent enigma of the writing process as a source of music, I offer these notes to readers interested in delving further into the minutiae of the text. Generally excluded are identifications of historical figures, place names, and other entities that might be located via obvious Internet keyword searches unless there is a detail to add not readily available to the public and which I deem of importance to understanding what is happening.

SPREAD 17 (LEARN TO LIVE WITH…)

FEAR OF VIOLENCE

A terror that has disrupted my relationship with America—and my family—since I was a child listening to a mother tell bedtime stories based on details of famous mass murders she had learned about from paperbacks carried in her huge purse.

the tide

For me, always, the tide is the gray-green current off Montauk, Long Island.

art that puts hair on my chest

Ref. to tiny snippets of paper found on my shirt during the composing of this poem.

COME BACK AFRICA

Ref. to the black-and-white film Come Back, Africa (1959) directed by Lionel Rogosin (1924-2000) and starring the mesmerizing Mariam Makeba (1932-2008); notable for its frank depiction of the Apartheid Era in South Africa.

have a good obey

Ref. to the once ubiquitous t-shirt (created by the artist Shephard Fairey: 1970-) featuring OBEY above an image of French wrestler Andre the Giant (1946-1993).

EMPTION

Emotion lacking full emotional content—a feeling preempted by inner obstacles.

SPREAD 18 (FORGET THE MELODY…)

gallows rope, good wood ruined, peeling sill paint, roach brother ETC

Stray details of the house I grew up in.

RRE

When a yard in an energetic city resembles an abandoned rural property.

THE TIMES GUT

Ref. to my father’s habit of tossing aside sections of the Sunday newspaper that collected around his recliner like the inky offal of a disemboweled continuum.

Whyam

Homage to the curious joy I always experience when reading the name Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), one of the founders of the art movement known as Vorticism.

SPREAD 19 (THE DECAF COFFEE…)

w b web

Ref. to prophetic lines spun by poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939).

swan lake

My great grandfather, Frank Miller, an immigrant from Scotland and a mechanic for the Milwaukee Road rail line, built a cottage on this Wisconsin lake. The place was magic to me. It made me want to run outside instead of hide from a difficult world: cool sandy soil, wildflowers, green lake smell, the whip-poor-will calling from pines.

bow-tie kind

Ref. to the courtly next door neighbor Mr. Hickey who always let pre-teen me in when I knocked on his door upset about events at home or on the playground.

lonnie’s lessons

Tree-climbing 18-year-old red-haired son of the Baptist minister who moved in across the street when I was ten and taught me how to tie a fisherman’s knot.

RAGBRAI

Ref. to the Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa, a summer event sponsored by the state’s largest newspaper that I participated in after I sold my comic book collection to raise funds to purchase a 10-speed Fuji bicycle.

meeting anna

The pink-hat-wearing writer I met in September of 1986 at 19 University Place in New York City, and married on December 9, 1989, in downtown Brooklyn.

Big Nick Nicholas

Saxophone player George Walker Nicholas (1922-1997)—nickname “Deedle dum”—was famous for hosting after hours jams in the 1950s at Harlem’s Paradise Club. I heard him play at St . Peter’s church in Manhattan in the 1990s.

bologna cut in squares and fried

Childhood meal staple I irrationally found more palatable if cut into different shapes before being fried in margarine.

sister dead at 44

For decades my talented sister Marianna Rose Miller (1967-2011) struggled with alcoholism and the effects of sexual abuse that occurred when she was a child.

michael dead at 31

Michael Current (1961-1992), high school classmate and visionary political activist whose work was responsible for the introduction of a gay rights bill in the Iowa Legislature in the late 1980s; he died of a diabetic crisis in Des Moines, the capital.

jack dead at 19

Jack Seier (1964-1983), president of my high school class and songwriter I supplied with lyrics; he drowned in the Mississippi River.

GUTHRIE HOOKER TATUM

Ref. to three musicians who taught me more about history than any book: Woody Guthrie (1912-1967), John Lee Hooker (1917-2001), Art Tatum (1909-1956).

duck creek, mississippi river…

Bodies of water—Iowa to Paris—that have lectured to me on many subjects.

lawless lawyers

Ref. to my parents, attorneys presiding over a home where no laws existed.

SPREAD 20 (STATUE HONORING THE STANZA…)

22nc

The 22nd draft not cooperating either.

thq

Thanks expressed in a questioning tone to a lovely image that interrupts a text.

lawk

When one embarks on a harmless lark that ends up preying on them like a hawk.

don’t forget hair

As with the hair of a corpse, I find that a draft filed deep in a cabinet still continues to grow in a fashion, new lines occurring to me at odd intervals.

L.R.

Initials of the pianist and composer Leon Russell (1942-2016) whose 1971 album Stranger in a Strange Land is on my Top Ten Supernal Albums list.

Ben Miller’s writing has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing, Best American Essays, Raritan, Salmagundi, AGNI, New England Review, Southern Review, Fiction International, and elsewhere. His awards include fellowships from the NEA and the Radcliffe Institute, as well as grants from the South Dakota Arts Council and the Schlesinger Library. He is the author of River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll Amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa.

Vi Khi Nao & Jessica Alexander

Vi Khi Nao is the author of six poetry collections & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), & the novel, Swimming with Dead Stars. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her collaborative work with Jessica Alexander, That Woman Could Be You, has just arrived from BlazeVOX. She was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.
Jessica Alexander’s novella, “None of This Is an Invitation” (co-written with Katie Jean Shinkle) is forthcoming from Astrophil Press. Her story collection, Dear Enemy, was the winning manuscript in the 2016 Subito Prose Contest, as judged by Selah Saterstrom. Her fiction has been published in journals such as Fence, Black Warrior Review, PANK, Denver Quarterly, The Collagist, and DIAGRAM. She lives in Louisiana where she teaches creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Adrian Lürssen

from ECO ling

the city silent (2021)

the city silent (2021)

the river (2021)

the river (2021)

taken (2021)

taken (2021)

I am without (2021)

I am without (2021)

he talks (2021)

he talks (2021)

first to speak (2021)

first to speak (2021)

“The history that resides within me speaks not only of actions that have happened once, in the distant past, it speaks of actions that have repeated themselves to the point of erasure. The history that resides within me speaks of trees, rivers, wounds, hands.”

This erasure project (provisionally collected as ECO ling) unfolded in late spring of 2021 — begun on the day I underlined the above passage in Christina Tudor-Sideri’s extraordinary meditation, Under the Sign of the Labyrinth (Sublunary Editions).

The history that resides within me speaks of actions that have repeated themselves to the point of erasure.

Over the past several years, I had begun to realize that the unease I’d felt in the U.S. had a familiar feel to it — a particular rhyming of history. For many white South Africans of my generation who left home during the height of Apartheid, the story —privileged, definitely; naive, probably — is usually a story of leaving that terrible form of erasure behind, for something better. But the unease, violence, division, erasure, and political manipulation of the Trump Age made the old suspicions clear, once and for all. I’d left nothing behind.

In that mindset, early 2021, I began questioning directions in my poetic work. By which forensic process could I free voices (“speaking of trees, rivers, wounds, hands”) from the closed texts of my childhood, from the colonial, post-colonial, and Apartheid-era language and history of my country of birth? I followed various paths to new questions, if not answers.

At the same time, my wife — a designer — had been reading about the cyanotype photograms of English photographer and botanist Anna Atkins while using Northern California sunlight to create her own cyanotype record, on fabric, of the plants and flowers growing in our garden, and collected on our hikes on Mount Tamalpais.

I wanted in on the printmaking action. Especially one focused on recording absence in presence.

At that point, poet and translator Norma Cole and I were more than a year into a meandering, glorious, easy conversation that transpired day after day, almost entirely via texts between us. In counterpoint to the isolation and dread pervading that time, our daily conversation created a world in which we found shelter, and from which came a series of collaborative poems (Briefings) which I then printed in cyanotype.

One day, while waiting for a set of Briefings to dry, I grabbed a copy of Rudyard Kipling stories that I hadn’t opened in years — tales of empire — and tore a page from one story whose title had always troubled me. A Second Rate Woman. I saw ECO in the title and LING in the name — and began a process of erasure using pencil and the chemical paints that, once exposed to sunlight, would turn sky blue.

My work on the remaining erasures occurred daily against the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of May, 2021, and in the larger collection of ECO lings, about two dozen pieces all told, I feel that echo among all the other threads and concerns described above.

Kipling was a regular visitor to Cape Town (later, my childhood home), guest of another champion of empire, Cecil Rhodes, in a residence that is now part of the University of Cape Town.

In 2015, a memorial to Rhodes was removed from the UCT campus after protests by student activists. I do not know what sits in its place.

Born and raised in South Africa, Adrian Lürssen lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. His chapbook, NEOWISE, is forthcoming from Trainwreck Press. Over the years, his poetry has appeared in Fence, Phoebe, Indiana Review, The Bombay Gin, The Boston Review, American Letters & Commentary, Word for/Word, NOMATERIALISM, and places elsewhere. Collaborations with Norma Cole are forthcoming in Second Stutter. On instagram at @adequatic

Sarah J. Sloat

Being Busy
Disdain
Empty My Chest
Smoke
Spite
Voyeur

Sarah J. Sloat is the author of Hotel Almighty, a collection a visual poetry published in 2020 by Sarabande Books. Born in New Jersey, Sarah has lived for many years in Europe, where she works in news. Her poems, prose and collage have appeared in The Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Sixth Finch and elsewhere. You can keep up with her at sarahjsloat.com, on Twitter at @SJSloat and on Instagram at @sjane30.

Nance Van Winckel

This Before That
This Before That
The Meteoric Life
The Meteoric Life
The Storied Place of the Story
The Storied Place of the Story
Just Snip the End
Just Snip the End
Nance Van Winckel’s ninth poetry collection, The Many Beds of Martha Washington, appears July, 2021 with the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series. She’s also published five books of fiction and is the recipient of two NEA fellowships, the Washington State Book Award, a Paterson Fiction Prize, Poetry Society of America’s Gordon Barber Poetry Award, a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, and three Pushcart Prizes. She teaches in Vermont College’s MFA in Writing Program and lives in Spokane, Washington.

Janis Butler Holm & Gina Osterloh

Apples and Bananas

Artists’ Statements
 
Gina Osterloh: Through the simple gesture of trying to grasp, “Apples and Bananas” is a play on the futility of gender categories, critiquing the absurdity of our gendered expectations. The video is a response to Richard Serra’s 3-minute 30-second film “Hand Catching Lead” (1968), which has a grasping hand–in profile, palm facing camera–repeatedly missing, catching, dropping a piece of scrap lead.
 
Janis Butler Holm: Gina Osterloh’s “Apples and Bananas” brought home to me that what we perceive to be natural–so natural that we readily consume it–is in fact a weighted ideology, designed to reinforce dominant binaries even as we fail to align with them.
 
Gina Osterloh’s photography, video, and performance art address symbolic themes and formal elements such as the void, the orifice, and the grid–and encourage a heightened awareness of color, repetitive pattern, and repeated actions. Osterloh’s work is represented by Silverlens (Manila) and Higher Pictures (New York).
 
Janis Butler Holm has served as Associate Editor for Wide Angle, the film journal, and currently works as a writer and editor in sunny Los Angeles. Her prose, poems, and performance pieces have appeared in small-press, national, and international magazines, including Posit. Her plays have been produced in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.
 
Bassist/composer/producer Joël Dilley’s original music is heard in TV, film, web, and ambient settings worldwide, including HBO, Discovery Channel, Food Network, and more. His website is www.joeldilley.com.
 
Award-winning songwriter Bett Butler’s poetry and short fiction have appeared in Weave, Feathertale, Voices de la Luna, Amp, and Fabula Argentea. Her website is www.bettbutler.com.

 

Kristin LaFollette

The Accident (2017)
The Accident (2017)
like a cell of your skin (2019)
like a cell of your skin (2019)
Old Bones (2019)
Old Bones (2019)
Kristin LaFollette is a writer, artist, and photographer and is the author of the chapbook, Body Parts (GFT Press, 2018). She is a professor at the University of Southern Indiana and serves as the Art Editor at Mud Season Review. You can visit her on Twitter at @k_lafollette03 or on her website at kristinlafollette.com.