Caolan Madden

Poetics of Loneliness

The silence, the league of witches.
The clean bed. I am no man’s
Elizabeth;
that unclaimed feeling.

Moonlit meadow, crooked tree.
Is it confessional. Is it persona.
To invest instead in information
somehow not processed by a body

The words deformed by a throat and
the fingers deformed by words,
the slick of fat on the cauldron

Once or twice under the winter sky,
midwinter, gold window. Summer,
a roof, once or twice. A candle
changes a face. A body the snow.

Your Mother Wasted a Year

Your mother drank nine million tequila gimlets

Your mother wanted them foamy

Your mother read Fifty Shades of Grey

Your mother walked up Rugby Road feeling restless feeling that teenage feeling feeling spoiled

Your mother walked up Rugby Road singing Summer is ready/when you are and it was summer

Your mother walked up Rugby Road listening to Summer is ready/when you are and it was technically the last day of winter/the magnolia bulbs were hard knobs against the gray sky/you were a hard knob against your mother’s pelvis/she lifted her feet one by one by

Your mother’s manicure was Blue-Away and impeccable

Your mother’s lipstick was NSFW

Your mother drank seven Estonian beers

Your mother poured that year down the drain like the coffee in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Your mother knew that waste is luxury

Your mother said I don’t want to grow up I want to spoil

Your mother didn’t want to lose weight

Your mother didn’t want to do homework

Your mother didn’t want to lean in

Your mother didn’t want to preregister for daycare

Your mother lost touch with all her friends

Your mother only played video games

Your mother leveled up but not IRL

Your mother held the domestic record for longest quickening chain in Final Fantasy XII

Then your father achieved the same score but only after

Your mother knows it’s mean to say the year in which you were conceived is a year she wasted

Your mother knows that now that you, the trace of you, exists, she can never waste anything again

Your mother knows that “can never” means “should never” but also “will never be able to”

Your mother knows that “she can never” means “she is not”

Your mother knows that when you made your shape known she folded up her I

Your mother holds you in her pocket like a ticket

Your mother could not lift her head from the sofa on New Year’s Eve

Your mother said why didn’t anyone invite me anywhere for New Year’s Eve

Your mother used to think what if I threw myself under a truck

Your mother thinks what if I let you kill me

Your mother painted your room blue because you’re supposed to be a girl

Your mother was denied financing

Your mother walked up Rugby Road and “Pretty Good Year” came on and she thought

Your mother used to feel bad about the boys she couldn’t love

Your mother knows you are her opus

Your mother wrote you all over her diary

Your mother put you on her google calendar

Your mother knows she will get the reminder

Caolan Madden has an MFA from Johns Hopkins and is currently a PhD candidate in English literature at Rutgers. Her poems and essays have appeared in Bone Bouquet, Black Warrior Review, Split Lip, Anthropoid, and WEIRD SISTER. VAST NECROHOL, a chapbook-length poem in the form of a video game, is forthcoming from Hyacinth Girl Press.

Editors’ Notes (Posit 13)

 

Spring may be imminent, but, as will likely be the case for some time to come, this issue of Posit arrives in less-than-optimistic times. However, once again, the work in this issue has the potential to address, and even salve, our pervasive distress, in ways that are no less satisfying for being indirect. Much of the art in this issue is about making — and all of it makes the case for the value of its having been made. Which is to say, for the value of art itself — not as luxury, as the current US regime might have it — but as emotional, intellectual necessity. One facet of which is its uncanny capacity to speak to situations that did not exist when it was created. Although the poetry and prose in this issue was written before the advent of the current political crisis, many of these pieces find a way to speak to it. Thus, that “we have somehow, / in haste and hubris, walked / into a deep night” is, unfortunately, incontestable (Matthew Burns, The Border). As is the fact that “even sanity ain’t sane today” (Anselm Berrigan, Degrets). Or that we are asked to believe that “once spoken, every word is true, even / all the words yoked to great chains of lies” (Gregory Crosby, The Marquis of Sad).

Happily, the works in this issue also have “a harmony that makes us forget the incontestable” (Dennis Barone, Vast Oculus). For one thing, we are reminded “not to fear the truth, to understand the neighbor, the houses, and this land” (Vast Oculus). And we are offered the grave and ethereal beauty of G.C. Waldrep’s “root & its entourage / ark-in-the-forest, / zither-lit & -strung” (first person). We are exhorted, with ringing, if enigmatic, energy, to “substitute optimistically!” (Rae Armantrout, Going Somewhere). Which I take the liberty of interpreting, at least in part, as an injunction to continue making, and imbibing, the arts, including:

Rae Armantrout’s tantalizing chains of Delphic utterances, guiding our gaze in “the fullness of time” from the spare beauty of the resonant particulars to the universes coiled within them, bringing to mind Bashō, W. C. Williams, Hansel and Gretel, and the inspiriting newborn whose “just opened eyes / see we can’t see what;”

Dennis Barone’s Vast Oculus, opening its generous aperture from the tangible familiar to “another world . . . beyond the armchair — like the point of a rapier” in prose that captures the ultimate essence of poetry, “leap[ing] from the enormous weight” of reality to “follow ideas without bodies;”

The urgent yet playful poetics of Anselm Berrigan’s Pregrets, Degrets, and Regrets, which may not expect “fragment bump” but delivers that and more, “revers[ing] the outer corners until specific arrival” of something very much like revelation “mandates itself / into existence” despite the possibility that there may be “no time for poems / with all this e-sociology poised to bite in disparate / need of absolute paragons;”

Matthew Burns’ lithe and slender verse columns exploring absence and corporeality, boundaries and trajectories, hope and despair: “zero / being nothing / but, like / the past: / still there / and affecting” as these spare and melancholy verses;

James Capozzi’s eerily relevant evocations of the demise of the mighty, from Nimrod, “basted by the city’s voice” to the conquistadores, having lost the nerve to defend their “sham heaven” in the face of the “troubling questions” posed by the earth they have just torched;

Rob Cook’s sharp yet lyrical elegies to the existential divide between self and other, be they one’s own shadow or the companion of one’s dreams, until even “the wind is just my shadow / moving its weapons from tree to tree;”

Gregory Crosby’s aphoristic verses masterfully evoking the pathos and humor of existence in which “[a]ll this death [is] another sticky note: Live!” in a universe “so / magnanimous that it breaks your heart in two;”

Julia Leverone’s exploration of the paradoxical interdependence of creation and destruction, adhesion and repulsion, as voiced by an unregretful Medusa hoping “never to return to the beforehand” and a lover observing the “force of keeping / together against pulling away;”

Caolan Madden’s penetrating exploration of isolation, “[t]he silence, the league of witches . . . that unclaimed feeling,” along with the ambivalence of a mother who doesn’t “want to grow up I want to spoil” rather than “fold . . . up her I” “when [the baby] made [her] shape known;”

F. Daniel Rzicznek’s prose poems from Leafmold, an inventory of poetic makings, including dogs and doctors, hawks and herons, history and science, “[i]naccuacies and errata smuggled via alternate versions of this weird life” brilliantly assembled, not “to deliver something heinous . . . but a text like a free state, a paregoric of the brain;”

Alina Stefanescu’s high-octane prose pieces expanding from a sense of lived experience (insomnia, scars, selfies) to wider implications in “this era of anodyne-paradigms pocked upon our model houses” where “a promise might be less than an omen as a toothache is less than a broken jar as a head circles the room without one single landing strip in sight;”

and G.C. Waldrep’s elegant, emotionally charged jewels of melodic and depictive compression, “lobed with the literal,” in which “the dream sweeps / through, & puts music away–,” evoking worlds in each parsed and potent word — luminous worlds in which meaning and music are not only married, but inseparable.

I would also like to take this opportunity to welcome the newest member of the Posit team. Carol Ciavonne is an accomplished poet, teacher, editor, and past contributor, who promises to bring discernment, dedication, and generosity to her work as Associate Editor. We are delighted and grateful to welcome her aboard.

With thanks to you, our readers, for being here.
Susan Lewis

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Welcome to the visual art of Posit 13!

Nathan Brujis makes lyrical and luscious abstract paintings, loosely based on nature and autobiographical experience. Working in a rich palette of saturated colors, he weaves ribbons of form in, under, over, and around one another. These canvases hint at abstract narratives while always retaining their joyful exploration of the painting process.

The almost ritualistic patternings of Jeanne Heifetz’s drawings are hypnotic. They seem to meander across the page, yet there is always an underlying logic to the journey of her lines. Using a visual ordering system based on the branching of natural structures, her work investigates the organic growth of form and the movement of marks on paper.

Eva Kwong’s miraculous sculptures exist somewhere between the natural and fabricated worlds. Drawing upon her interest in the spiritual and visual interconnectedness of the universe, she creates beautiful objects that manage to make reference to many different realities simultaneously. Her animated sculptures delight the eye while defying categorization.

The sculptures of Greely Myatt build upon the notion of “transformation.” His impeccably crafted found and fabricated mixed-media sculptures are funny and provocative, playing with artistic and social conventions in an amusing and elegant manner. Myatt references everything from rural southern culture to contemporary art, creating both installation and intimate scale works that welcome the viewer in, with a wink and a nod.

And Brian Sargent’s deep dive photographic investigations into light and the landscape capture an eerie mood. The sky seems on the verge of dusk, the light fading… or is it about to dawn? They are full of mystery and quietude. The occasional flash of a silhouetted figure, a ghost or a vision? The choice is yours.

I hope you enjoy!
Melissa Stern