Tag Archives: Posit 36

John Yau

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Last Painting

A stirring of the inhibited senses until she became pigment on a surface. Others lined up and
began dreaming, unrepentant wastrels. There is no clock to guide them, no sheep or police
officer to show them which way the path will betray their footsteps. Addendum. She didn’t die
because they said she did, on her way to the far-off mountains, a city bellowing with smoke, a
stone cottage in the forest where the woodcutter has just cut off his hand. That was just the
way a poet saw her in a chrysanthemum time, during her pilgrimage to the incomprehensible.
He did not know she was walking in sunlight, he was too far away to see her profile, too blind to
realize he was beside her every step of the way. Disquieted by hearing her name whispered by
ghosts gathered along the river, soaking away the stains of their last life in the frothy current,
she did not fit into the folds of the painting releasing her and he knew it.

Diary of Discontents

1.) The movie did not stay with me. In fact, it was never there.

2.) Later, when I realized the animals suspended all forms of broadcasting, I
stopped sending messages via the usual channels. As the poet dwindled
further into the sour, he began making gnomic pronouncements: a bird in the
hand, it takes two, you just can’t. Students copied the statements into spiral
notebooks, speculated on what was left out and why. Whirlpools of wind
swirled down the street, lifting and dropping insects whose spirits had
departed.

3.) You just can’t pay less than full attention to huts made with a radial arm saw.

4.) Returned to lab. Went straight there from drugstore. Walked under rubber
clouds. Found series of inappropriate messages delivered to electronic
mailbox. Warning shots fired. As information highway becomes increasingly
crowded with squatters, the odds of shopping malls squeezed between
prison complexes and gated communities multiply like fungi after rain. Have
you ever thought about the fluorocarbons lurking in your spaghetti?

5.) Sobbing church bell bread stick complications.

6.) Dancing with skin, flotilla of small scars continuously changes shape. As
weeks pass, busboy thickens. Flasher flicks make brief comeback on outer
fringes of suburbs. There are so many different kinds of Asians living in New
York it is getting harder to tell them apart.

7.) Soon to be a major emotional picture.

8.) A sea of bobbing pink umbrellas floods the plaza. It is proving difficult to
align outer carapace with inner substance. Kulaks and kayaks drift apart in
commercial. Stop waffling over your waffles, my little alphabet.

9.) Full disclosure is a come-on.

10.) Went up to the coffin and kissed your cold lips good-bye. Memory of that
moment returns unexpectedly while staring at computer screen. Younger
brother doing the same thing. Woman who needed to be hoisted up the stairs.
Talking to people who told a story rather than their names. Father counting the
bouquets, wondering if he will have as many when his time comes.

11.) Remember, the brain is not a safe place to think.

Aging Elfin Blues

Bald and on brink of evaporation
I climb onto latest mushroom
to rise out of black loam
and ding out a few trembling bars…

I am not sure why I needed to write this down. Nearly everyone who was there is dead or
locked away in a tinny bin, where no one gets tucked in at night. Nix velvet caps with
cowbells. Next time bring a bow and an arrow or two. Remember to wash your glittery
socks, one in each hand, in a sink big enough to cup a baby sparrow. And don’t wear that
awful blue bowtie, I was told. But, as these things go, I failed to listen, and all records of
my participation were expunged. You cannot change history even after it changes you.
Believe that and you will be spotted wearing a hard hat the next time you go to the
bathroom under a full moon.
Have you reached that point in your life where you are unable to hear the latest round of
thunderstorms brewing in the refrigerator?
What kind of hogwash is this if you can’t rinse off the family pig?
I tried to tell you that forgetting is the shortest route to fame, but you were too busy
listening to the other broadcast, the one full of rushing waters, skies bathed in horrid
colors. What if post-zombie gas stations become a popular tourist destination? Will that
mean we, Diary of Discontent, won? At certain moments any wonder will do.

Documentary Cinema

Money moves the herd, divides the nods from the hardnosed, keeps others lacquered shut.
Occasionally, unexpected turbulence from a recalcitrant stump lantern introduces confusion,
but these interruptions are not unexpected and easily papered over. While across the aisle,
another globe sets off sparks. What animal do you most resemble when you are not an armadillo,
surrounded by sordid ornaments, sweaty to the touch? Tender bellow mortified by fat. Postcard
gargoyle in need of a second bath. Mouth full of severed thumbs. Pauses in leaky silence, station
changes, climb into latest examples of a ruined civilization, what we call the present. Moon
pasted frozen bright on wall near names of repeatedly missing. Adjacent to commuter clatter,
some filled with hard eyes. Wheel cover pandering to paper blocks, championing virtues of
carbon trash, rods circulating cups on ice. Another bleeding sky cools at its own pace.

John Yau is a poet, critic, and publisher of Black Square Editions. His recent books include Please Wait by the Coatroom: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art (Black Sparrow, 2023) and Tell It Slant (2023, Omnidawn). The exhibition, Disguise the Limits: John Yau’s Collaborations with Artists is currently at the University of Kentucky Art Museum, and a catalog is forthcoming. His reviews appear regularly in the online magazine, Hyperallergic.

Lisa Sewell

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from Back to the Mat

 

Exploring the Edge // bore tide // Estuary

With nowhere to go but down, no leaves or branches,
the harbor seals breathe and doze on the spit

where salt and fresh waters mingle. They slide
into the surf and vanish, borne upstream 

by the tidal bore, trusting the body can be held
as if in a hammock, free of burden, free of weight. 

I too must give myself over, forget the drone strikes
reported to have killed 200 civilians and notice instead

the quiet rise and fall of my chest, the spacious thoughts
like waves. I keep a watch for the bowls of silver fur

that break the surface, that disappear and appear again
a few feet closer, gravely raising shoulders and sleek heads 

to regard me, raincoat shrouded, wavering on the shore.
Their coal eyes fill with what looks like reproach, 

though it may be curiosity. Like Bishop says, it’s clear
they are believers in total immersion. Named sea-dog in Dutch, 

they will follow your kayak upstream and you must resist
the urge to plunge in or run a palm across their wild animal heads. 

Whatever else the seal knows, for a moment in her gaze
I am here on a rocky shore and I linger there to dissipate.

 

Mean Season

Oxnard, CA

The Santa Anas of my childhood
are back, red katabatic winds

that make your hair stand
electric, that begin as a cold mass

and warm as they unroll and surge
through the Santa Monica range

where the Woolsey fire has jumped
the 101 and is heading for the coast.

They rustle the hibiscus and palm trees,
the unevenly trimmed hedge

of cherry laurel beside the stranger
on his balcony, who shades the air around his head

with smoke. Joan Didion said those winds
dry the hills and nerves to flash point, and likewise

suddenly the man is gone: I watch him slide
between the sliding doors and emerge

street-level, frantically swiveling his head east
then west then east again before breaking

into a run like a person pursued,
like a person possessed by an invisible charge.

In this beachfront neighborhood
we are praying the winds don’t shift,

that the air remains invisible.
The neighbor at 5238 Surfrider

fires-up his blow torch. Brief sparks jump
around his hands and helmeted face

and everything holds its breath
until the buzzing stops. Now the stranger

returns (he wasn’t out for a jog)
with a Red Heeler named Antoinette.

He speaks to her in clipped
censuring French: saloperie, putain du merde

over and over as if his own unsettled soul
were lurking there, trying to escape.

 

Field Notes on the Toroweap Formation

Grand Canyon National Park

Sixteen days undertaken to take in and to be taken
on the water feed of daily releases from the cold

underbottom of Glen Canyon dam. On the sixth day
of our trip, the seventy-third of John Welsey Powell’s

second journey, I said good-bye to the Coconino shale,
good-bye to Mauv limestone, having unpacked and repacked

my tackle and tools. Powell came to solve the mysteries
of four-hundred and fifty miles of river through desert canyons,

and found hundreds of sites to survey,
name, and define, erasing everything that was there

with his imagination: Marble Canyon, Flaming
Gorge, Horseshoe Bend, Redwall Cavern. Powell’s notes

at first full and even fulsome, dwindled as the situation of the party
became constantly more desperate, and at last became mere jottings.

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Underway and under sway we came for the wilderness
that was never wild, for vast distances never empty,

to walk the narrows of Blacktail canyon and span
a billion years with a fingertip pressed to the Great

Unconformity where more recently made Tapeats sandstone
rubs against the ancient Vishnu Schist. We found

our great unknown but with every eddy mapped and every current
quarantined between two reservoirs that fill with silt

and lose a foot of storage each year. It was difficult to sleep
and every morning I woke to half-light, lying crossways

on the raft, adrift or beached by shifting, regulated tides,
everyone else asleep and dreaming of the hike to Deer Creek,

everyone except the yellow-shirted man banging beer cans
into disks—filling his dry bag with our collective excess.

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Trip lengths vary depending on propulsion. We were not
motorized. We faced the worst headwinds in twenty years

for June someone said. Everyone irritable and exhausted
by noon, by 1 p.m. My John was not the trip leader

and could not be blamed for missed campsites and side canyons,
for the coffee and potatoes at the bottom of Bedrock Rapid,

but he suffered the missed eddies and broken oars
of near-calamity. His arms and back and abs and legs

the engine that drove the raft through Hance and Granite
and Crystal. Mostly, I wasn’t there to witness, gliding instead

through the needle’s eye in my kayak, skimming the edges
of hydraulics the 18-foot raft could punch right through,

though sometimes I was buffeted by currents, grabbed
by the throat (at least that’s how it feels) and pulled asunder.

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The fierce afternoon headwinds were fierce
and even with vertical drops, from the shore I watched John

stalled and silhouetted, windstruck and standing still,
trying to slam the oars forward with his hands.

Imagine lining the wooden boats over most of the broken water
with ropes. Or after half a day of hard labor, feeling the rope,

then the boat pull, then bounce, spin out and tumble down Unkar
or Lava, supplies, and coffee mugs, plates and flour

spilling, spreading and floating downstream, something
always broken that cannot be repaired, an oar or desire,

the skin on your hands. Exhausted beyond measure, sunburnt
and sandwhipped, John was asleep by 8 p.m. or even 7.

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I kept company with his dreams which were vivid
and made him scream or cry out, fuck you you fucks,

or help me no help in a voice that arrived from the bottom
of a well. I sang a secret sweetness into his nightmares

and when I slept, dreamed the milky blue of Havasu Creek, the moon
at its core and the ghostly humpback chub

where sweet waters meet the chilly measured arms
of the main. It’s the only place those chub survive

and in the early morning light I could not sleep through,
I tilted my page to catch the glow, to rend the broken lines

and broken waters, to chapter through the days
but brought back only scraps of what the expedition taught:

names and profiles of ghosts, all the riverine shrubs,
bushes, trees and grasses that no longer thrive.

Lisa Sewell is the author of several books, including Impossible Object and Birds of North America, a collaboration with artist Susan Hagen and poet Nathalie Anderson. Her fifth book, Flood Plain, will be published by Grid Books in 2024. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Villanova University.

Ann Pedone

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from: The Monogamist

Then I was at the embassy.
Then I was picking up
chunks of ice a truck had
dumped off by the side
of the freeway.

Then I was in my car
listening to the radio.
A guy going on about the
history of European
socialism and this very
specific way men had
of jacking off during
the long fifteenth century.

Hic, haec, hoc won’t stop fucking me

I’ve run out of sugar to stop it.

 

When I was twelve or thirteen I lived for a
summer next to a cold creek. Back then that
was what was known as the politics of “long
distance women”, or forgetting to hold your
pocketbook close to your chest. Let’s get to
work! And all the husbands in line at
Safeway do their very best to remain unpainted,
although some are still slightly bruised. I still
remember that morning when I had the rare
luxury of moving the entire prehistory of my sex
life counter-clockwise. Smaller than usual atoms
are always the most fertile. And it calms me. Like
a brand new estrogen patch. Or pouring someone
else’s hot soup all the way down the drain.

 

Your cock looked a little dogwood the first time
you took it out. Had you left it inside another
language for too long? Or was it late to pick up
its prescription? Every hour more rescuers are
needed in the flood zone. More lines of cable
desperately have to be lain. What makes a line
in a poem? In a body? That so many migrant
boats are at the very bottom of the Mediterr
anean. Let me tell you what history teaches,
said mother Gertrude Stein. History teaches.

 

The Byzantine Empire is a sensation.
Like going in for a full bikini wax but
deciding instead to stop eating meat.
I know you had a pretty decent childhood.
And I admire you for that.
Which makes it even more strange that you
felt the need to write me a list of all your
sexual sticking points.

Since this morning I’ve taken a shower
three times execution style.
And now whenever someone says the
word “poem” I always hear “she really
wanted to do it but her prolapsed uterus kept getting in the way.”

 

What is rightly sucked.
What is left barren during all the long
summer months.
What happens to a man’s erection when you
tell him that Western Literature started
when a bunch of Greek guys tried to
fuck another man’s wife.

I stand or fall with the very thickness of this.

These pieces come from a project I’ve been working on called “The Monogamist.” In the work we follow a woman who’s doing something that I think we’ve all done-she’s trying to figure out the relationship she’s currently in-and in so doing, she thinks about language, the body, what it means to be a woman who is very loud about her own horniness-which my phone just auto-corrected to “hormones,” which, I suppose, makes sense since she is going through menopause.

This is what the project wants to be. What it refuses to be is yet another Madame Bovary story of a woman who suffers because of whom or how she loves. And it refuses to depict a woman’s body as solely a site of trauma, or of male desire. Instead, I wanted to blow these two things up and find a way to tell a different sort of story-while at the same time, always acknowledging and grappling with the fact that trauma and the male gaze are very real and ever-present.

Ann Pedone is the author of The Medea Notebooks (Etruscan Press), The Italian Professor’s Wife (Press 53) and Liz (forthcoming from Tofu Arts Press) as well as numerous chapbooks. Her work has recently appeared in Texas Review, The American Journal of Poetry, the Dialogist, Barrow Street, 2River and Tupelo Quarterly. She graduated from Bard College with a degree in English Literature, and has a Master’s in Chinese Language and Literature from Berkeley. She is the founder and editor in chief of the journal and small press, αntiphony.

Luke Munson

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Devotion

Listen, I tell me. There’s so much
to forget. We read every word,

even the blueprints for the temple,
and the unimaginable dead. I would

never live there. I remember the cedars,
the cubits. My mother slept through most of it,

would wake to add another detail, and fade
back into the city. We were building

the city. You could do that.
It rang out as long as our voices did.

Matinal

Early-morning dark, and there’s a man
in the kitchen weighted down by sheet-

pans beaten into a cuirass. Not knowing
what they eat who are so dead as to be spun

from sugar and plague-rhyme, I offer a little
of everything—apples, bread, coffee, beer—even

my cat’s tinned chicken. He’s wearing a battle-skirt
of leather strips, and when he paces, I can

see his balls. He was betrayed,
his litter-mates die at dawn.

What a terrible place he’s vanished to. I have
nothing good to say. When his shadows deliver

their burning letter of writ, we forget
our excuses, our very good reasons. I once

thought things would stay the same, only worsen
incrementally. He’d saved up years’ worth

of nail clippings for such an occasion,
and it’s a long way home. Goodbye, oblivion.

Poem With No Blessing

A boy named Mort (I shit
you not) with Robert Smith inked
on his breast; my great-aunt Fran and the rabbit

she gave me that you could wind to play a clear
needle song; a brass key; a name; a book;
a summer day in Campina Grande when Sílvio and I

found a man heaped under a tree who (drunk?
dead?) stank and had bled. We returned
to his house to play video games

and remain with whatever we couldn’t
comprehend—all of it, and only if I don’t
hold on too dearly, only if I don’t stumble

retracing the way back, as though it were possible
to hide from some great beast
by keeping within its footprints.

I really don’t think I’ll mind dying—
all I’ve misplaced comes back—
but something has been bothering me,

and I haven’t figured it out yet.
How do you do it? How
is anyone still alive? 

After Joseph Cornell’s The Lanner Waltzes

With what joy were we
bathed in blue, learned

our steps, buttressed in Winter’s
finest crinoline. We could have danced

forever on a single leaf.

The sun has stopped going
away now. It will do no more

this season. Don’t banish us.

Don’t break the spell. Who told
you the stars are cold?

Luke Munson has an MA in Creative Writing from UC Davis. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Shenandoah, ballast, and The Interpreter’s House. He wrote and helped produce with the LA artists’ collective Die Kränken a video play which was in exhibition at USC’s ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in 2017. He lives in Northern New Mexico with his partner and their cats.

Rod Val Moore

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Fever

First, recognition then attachment.
This is how I arrived at infantile love.
Family was there, family smiled, or
smirked. After love came animal intellect
in a backyard of toothed weeds. Some of
it was insight, an embrace of grass and
apricot. A bewitching. Then stupidity.
Every thought detached itself from me,
turned into a stroke of black and dog
along the bent down grasses. Later a
neighbor girl gently touched my
bottom rib, maybe claimed it, saying
how she preferred boys’ skeletons
to boys. That night, in bed, I imagined
my fingers as pliers, drawing out her
tongue to understand its wise machinery.

Milpitas

Younger and older brother rotated,
declined, took form in anger and sphere.
One was weaker, hair tipped with cold flame,
one larger & dancing, thick with lumpen rage.

Both were arctic, apart, parallel to the wind,
Reduced to ashes, then resurrected by television.
The gray-scale electrons washed us out of
ourselves like acid, clean with so much watching.

Tonight I need to remember this more clearly.
There’s a tall green vodka bottle on a table in
Milpitas. My eyes focus on the not yet dead.
Cigarettes pass from monster to monster to me.

Wyoming

A town littered with broken antlers,
my thoughts so far away. Dad, as
always, driving.

A horse fly flew in through a rolled
down window straight into our flesh
and tension.

What I had in my eye was just a tear,
not the clear water of self. Mother
slept but held me on her lap, until she

dreamed I was a snake
and screamed and threw me to the car floor.
Since then one sack of memory rubble

gets dragged behind. A prophet paces the rooms
of his wives-crowded tower. My stitches
come out and leave a vivid scar, snaking.

San Jose

We brothers were paper, cut clean from
the mothering. Grown children, inflated.

His head was onionskin, peeling.
In science fiction he’d have knives for eyes,

but they turned around backwards,
sharp in and of themselves, carving cancer.

I remember the cigarette that Mom slapped
from his lips in dim light patio party limbo.

I can’t stand to see you do that, she said. But
I can’t tear out my own eyes now can I,

she said, then hesitated.

Rod Val Moore has worked as a fiction writer for many years, with various awards and publications in that genre, but has recently shifted his focus to poetry. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the artist Lisa Bloomfield.

Alex Mattraw & Adam Thorman

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Phone Feed: Bombogenesis

“On its way up, even before the water breaks the surface, it can seep into the cracks of basements, infiltrate plumbing, or, even more insidiously, re-mobilize toxic chemicals buried underground.” —Rosanna Xia, Los Angeles Times, January 17, 2023, documents “hidden flood risk from sea level rise and groundwater”

Scrawl a checklist to cross out how you feel. Stargaze
glass, nape story, always on the ridge of defunding
the sunrise. Live, laugh, flood, so in this terra, I am
tracking every loop                        Store, flood, wake.
Store, fret, wake              Store, wept, wake, flood,
store                                    I’d drink for the harbor
to recover the pasture. But portrait light identifies
my dark              water mode : two people running
away at the same time. Loud steps flash
shortcuts recorded into one act:
How much did you win?
Everything dangerous because     Are you my angel?
It’s still raining?
in the round world                          sand = cyanide = storm
scrolled in. 341 days                      pay to fall
terrified at the work meeting where packed sardines open
and close
flora in their mouths. Administer your raise,
red path to trap                   burnout. Their tin
hooks.                        Ready stacked moons.
Cut up frames on your camera roll, pocket
handsome covers. Sign the contract, await
the rise.              Shiver on the bank, hillside
bulletins, nightships, wool trade, etc.

It’s too late, you say.
Cancel atrial trust. Oxygen wheels allowances,
sells pasture
blades. Cycles                        select cells designed to taper
us at both ends. Turn              fusiform where forests would
message ever.                        Neon green must splash.
Then shave the land.              Wake, flood, shore
the shepherd you want to see in the world.

VOIDS

On the phone in the coastal hole, you ask me to respond
to your VOIDS. Photos ever expanding. Out of “the thing
with feathers,” we disagree, roll thought I step between
poison                    oak tuffs, try on a reason distance attracts
sour                             [petrichor] honey
bee [death rates], etc. Center                             your instinct, you say,
then Faceaudio shutoff                              faces warmer pine
O                                                 [zone] windtrap. Cut
metaphor. I argue she never names the bird because
hope is [never singular.] 2020 is an adjective and air
smooths shellbone, thistle pins bare feet with pain that makes
each real. [What you see and look for you’ll only find
more of, and [                              the real question
is will then                             you find
lonely.

I follow bottomless storehouse VOID I name
OVID, VIDEO,
[one letter away] from transformation. Avoiding gravity
so intense nothing [can escape, even light].

On the shore
my daughter [tries to call out Milky Way but] calls Whiskey
Way. The sun isn’t even big enough to make a black hole but
[in the dark] all exists, pandemic. How important we think
we are ablyss. Now a joke                            about all things,
blots govern [word                        states] that made us
sick. Evolution                                          requires exclusion,
and so does rent. The hug you give her [near the parking lot,
hawk]                                       cawing petals.
This violet stare                              under nightlids’
need to be free of

the coastal hole

we

roll        in thought
sour
honey bee rates

I loop and

windtrap the bird

because hope is               2020 shellbone

thistle pins

to make each               feather vane feel for the new

illuminute

vocabulary

VOID
I name OVID

 

one letter away from violet
transformation

 

answers my daughter                            “The Whiskey Way”

the sun isn’t even big enough to make

a black hole               pandemic               lunaptic

we think               we are

. A joke

about evolution free of

parenatal heat or the bruise               you give land

petals under

nightlids               in the parking lot

hawkcawing

ablyss

Radio Homing

Wonder demands a tiny terror, so you call every turn
a return. The alien-most home, so we hike hill-black mounds
raising dust and clouds we call platypi, a jest for all limbs
God abandoned, and no one can spell. In the brightest heat
you receive each animal                             list of rocks, ridge of
leather                                                           doe smile you collapse
two years into this second                         dusk whispering pillowtalk,
ash feedback, unmedicated stories more beautiful than astonished
clasps of warmth                    around your wrist.                     Imagine
your mind as radio, you say, losing              loam footing. I recall
Hippocampal index binds
but won’t explain              experience.               Every tune shines
the lake, homes-in radial,                                  glass-lit and sure.

VOIDS

Adam Thorman and Alex Mattraw

An emptiness opens in the presence of our supposed post-truth era when facts can be defeated by baseless feeling. Defenses crack under a daily barrage against meaning. What new language is needed to unearth what gets buried? What new conversation can we have about the climate crisis, and the histories responsible for it?

This VOIDS excerpt comes from a book-length collaboration between the artist and photographer Adam Thorman and the poet Alex Mattraw. VOIDS is an experiment about juxtaposition: about hope at the edge of a future already erased. The work started with a small selection of Adam’s photograph series that he calls VOIDS, and Alex’s ekphrastic responses to it. Each created constraints for the other as the work unfolded. Some photographs inspired poems and some poems inspired photographs as both delved into their individual inhabitations of void [meaning, vacate (from Latin) and unoccupied (from Middle English)].

Moving in and out of conversations about anxiety, bliss, illness, and parenthood, fluid poetic forms and neologic play were central to Alex’s practice. Sometimes, Alex erased her original responses to Adam’s work, creating “guillotined sonnets,” Niedecker-inspired tercets, or looped erasures, with the aim of echoing images throughout the arc of an emerging narrative. Other times, she wrote lyrical prose responses to her research about the Gold Rush trading ships still buried under the Embarcadero markets.

For Adam, différance dictates that meaning is multiplicitous: Like a Magic Eye image, where you can perceptually shift between the beauty of the multiplicity and the nihilism of the negation of meaning, depending on your point of view. Either pole is overwhelming. “In the face of our current political environment, I experience a complete inability to make sense of how and why plain facts are ignored and spin outweighs all else. The calm of a landscape is not enough to placate, and I make images, just to carve the felt absences out of them.”

Out of all of this comes VOIDS. When surrounded by the incomprehensible, the only choice is erasure. Wash everything out in a field of darkness, let light obliterate and embrace. When everything means nothing, you start over at the beginning.

Alex Mattraw is the author of the poetry collections Raw Anyone (2022), We fell into weather (2020), and small siren (2018), all with Brooklyn’s Cultural Society. Her poems and reviews have appeared in places including The Brooklyn Rail, Jacket2, Lana Turner, Tupelo Quarterly, and VOLT. A frequent collaborator with other writers and artists, she is also the founder and curator of the Bay Area reading series, Lone Glen, now in its twelfth year.
Adam Thorman is an artist, photographer and educator based in Oakland, CA. He makes art about the landscape, abstracted, and his practice includes a mix of photography and hand- and digitally-altered prints and images that occasionally veer into the sculptural. Adam’s work is in the collection of SFMOMA and has been written about in The NY Times, LA Times, and KQED Arts, among others, and his work in collaboration with the poet Alex Mattraw has been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Radar Poetry, and Heavy Feather Review. Adam has a solo show at KOIK Contemporary in August 2024 in Mexico City and his first book, Creatures Found, will be published by The Eriskay Connection in late 2024.

Catherine Howe

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—click on any image to enlarge—

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Artist’s Statement

The many-hued paintings in “Wallflower” represent a catharsis, punctuating the end of a period of extreme isolation. After the shared solitude of the Covid outbreak, I was further sidelined by a diagnosis of blood cancer.

Excluded from socializing while undergoing treatment, I spent my days in the studio and the shaggy garden that surrounds it. My perennial companions were the local flora and fauna. While sitting things out, I focused on working and waiting and invited imagined partners to spin into my space.

The results are a group of paintings that are very different in their process and color-relationships, yet still linked to my past output. I could now really take my time and see what came up. These blooms spring wholly from this extended musing and an urge to anthropomorphize. They are purely invented and non-existent in nature, embodied in variegated brushstrokes on color fields of mutable, iridescent pigments.

It is a wet-into-wet process wherein nothing may stand still including myself, each piece being executed with full body engagement. Movement is an aspect of composition and function – both color and sheen shift as the viewer takes a step and realigns their view.

I imagined a garden of blooms in airy, watery spaces, or barely held captive by a vase. In my hopes, these flower figures possess a self-confidence and spirit that transcend earthbound woes.

It is now a world where nothing is alive without peril. This hard-won period of studio output reminded me it is also a paradise, where each day may see nature rising again to flourish still.

March, 2024

Catherine Howe received an MFA from SUNY Buffalo in 1983. The many publications that have reviewed her work include Art in America, Artforum, Art Critical, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times. Howe has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe for over thirty years, including shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, MoMA PS 1 in New York, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. She became Associate Director of White Columns in 1990, and in 2000, Chair of Faculty at the New York Academy of Art, where she taught MFA students for 21 years. She now paints full time in the Hudson Valley.

Mara Lee Grayson

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The Mother and the Lover Left Behind

One, broken,
a nose
with screws
for eyes, plated –
face of grey. Two’s
the figured
stick
who isn’t
sitting still.
Three, a sugar
spoonful set:
enough?
to medicate
the elder
and
the flower.
Four, most
of May, all June,
July, if August.

Coma’s kind
of an umbrella,
after
all –
tobacco
smear and vodka,
vengefulness
and butterfly
tattoos
can fit
under
its canopy.
And too, a man
who thinks himself afloat;
would
this, a butterfly
to give her wings, two
weeks to
gaze upon the sea.

Polaroid

made material
in photographs: faces, sky
and smoke, shapeshifters.

one cloud shifts a shape
of lion’s mane, another
made to conga drum,

palm and chin that know
the tension caught in camera
lens, looking after

birds that turn the earth –
strokes form feathers, feathers form
the something someone

sees. Loops tobacco sets
afloat when set afire make
what mouth and meter

rhyme miss manifest:
nostalgia (east), yearning (west).
Stillness.           Then motion

The Invisible Girlfriend Grows Restless

Winter turns one back
upon another, or the world –
let someone else pretend

that everything is hypothetical
until it isn’t.
You and I know better.

The cows on Stratton Mountain
have gone to bed to dream
of being worshipped.

I dream of being
worshipped like a tangerine,
or at least hit hard enough

to wrap my navel
twice around my spine
to shake the numbness, still

the rocking bones
comprise the sacrum. I try
to learn my lucid mind

the ins and outs of thread counts,
cotton folds, seasick linens
nauseated by the stuffing

of a built-in cabinet. Dander
sprinkles on dry skin, reminiscent
of a cupcake, dressed with dust

and ash. I’ve forgotten
whether cows sleep standing,
how it feels to be the rumor,

separated from the body.
Let’s speculate:
What must this earth taste

when she swallows
down the dead? I mouth
at the freckles

questions on your back, open-
ended night too late. I want
to know what bedsheets

sell us in our sleep.
The comforter is cynical.
You and I, no better.

No Matter How Languid, or How Familiar Sweet the Palms of Your Hands

Like we look up / rain comes

resting head finds collarbone / pollen sticks

swing from high bar / scaffold

Second Avenue / in summer

connections: one thing / another

grin makes sense / a decade later

narrow space between accident / and everything else

the spinning of the earth / how everything must

encompass nothing / if italics make a voice

a sword that flickers / invisible

but for the ears / a phrase half-formed

shapes itself into a feeling / eyelash light

fascia opening to possibility / a familiar chord

three doors away / or floating

overhead / the word is imperceptible

Like when / the rhetoric professor says

Don’t turn this into / something it’s not

Mara Lee Grayson’s poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and has been nominated for the Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes. An award-winning scholar of rhetorics of racism and antisemitism, Grayson is the author or editor of five books of nonfiction. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Grayson holds an MFA from The City College of New York and a PhD from Columbia University and currently resides in Southern California. Find her on social media @maraleegrayson.

ash good

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summer flung herself over the last of the peonies

—after Lunita Valeria Velázquez

in the obscene eruption/summer’s face is clean
& shameless/summer can fit the moon in her mouth
leaves a trail of clothes in the sand & has already swum
to the island across the river/summer has scooped
up the fallen fledgling & tucked our molting cry
into the lace hydrangea for safekeeping/summer
has three secrets, at least one she’ll tell no one

a woman i love wonders if the lights are the departed floating around her crown each morning

she tells me i am a transformer. i think immediately of the viral
video of a child’s cardboard costume. red autobot precisely scaled
to particular small limbs. somewhere a parent has done so much
& who is to say it was right or enough? in mazatlán my own parents
disembark a cruise ship to buy a souvenir poncho. this is the currency
they have to acknowledge i tend messes that are not mine.

she tells me i have some karma to hold space for the horror family
can be & yet my lord in heaven remains relating which creates
relations that are sometimes all fledgling. frightening hunger
& unhinged beak. in truth she prefaces all clairvoyance by calling
it cold. but the firelight of meaning is making the chilly vacuum
inhabitable. the bigger story helps me hold the small story.

i am someone else. i have cleaned the foaming tongue. wiped salty
release from two slack tear ducts. kissed still-warm forehead
& already-cooling hands. brushed silver hair. lifted window for
departure. asked permission to pick three slender stems & laid it
all light on still breast bone. the sunset is exquisite cloud ribs against
free pastel sky. the old barn creaks down into itself & the ground.

the seed

the seed of Erodium cicutarium (“stork’s bill”) plants itself using its
corkscrew growth that twists & untwists in response to changes in humidity

if i am generous i can pretend the desert neighbor’s generator is earth
purring. i am lizard perched high on a rock hillside amid blazing poppies
concerned only with small contentment of sun. an army of tufted spirals snares
my soft poncho & we pause in heat’s sink toward ocean. by some miracle, some body
somewhere withstands two bullets. by some network calculation elders worry holes
into fear stones. i take small temperatures with unanswerable questions. i want
to hear what i cannot hear. the seed is willing to sit with this for longer than i can.
i understand the missing beat when i ask how are you? i didn’t mean to ask
such a bad question. our worn-in trails are so comfortable, aren’t they? we’ve been
waiting all season for a good surprise at the turn. a twilight rustle to carry 1000
upon 1000 thank yous to fiery petals while ancestors warp sky in tunnel language—
it’ll only make sense midair like a seed travels. if we can see at all we can see what
will not fit into a body. there are our two-headed hungers tendriling into the road.
relatives who are cirrus clouds. ask any medicine woman to pull a card & it will speak
to what never intended to quench our ruthless patience, the clean mineral sweat
of other efforts, a chimera for a childhood pet. you imagined none of it. it being
miracle this whole place moves at speed— the psychic dust cloud boarding the late
train, any distance we travel for hospitable soil. once more it is clear: the seed
is delicate mission barbed into a cloak. we cling like celadon lichen to boulder.
this time i looked closer before i was asked to look closer. possibility another slight
corkscrew turned between thumb & forefinger. the seed spoke first, still whispers—

frankly, it’s dirty/never-ending praying in our swamp

—for my subconscious

you/i recently wriggled out of the python of not one but two addictions
or perhaps twisted right out of shed skin as we ourselves serpent/writhing/alive
(smooth bodies we coax to ensnare us at the mall pet shop when we are small &
there are even malls) or perhaps we are rare two-headed gopher snake (all four
eyes we lock gazes with for who-knows-how-long at that zoo in new orleans)
either way we are newly out of our own grasp & i even heard you say it feels good.

i want to tell the experts sometimes you summon a form like mine. we drag
blankets from our beds & hold hands under some gate inside (vacation kids
who steal one exotic night together on sand). i want to say your skin is so soft (our grip
tightens). we rest our legs up the walls, our solid shapes blocking doorways & curl
into empty/unformed space. us sweet/restless (glancing back from fast cars on
mountain roads at the explosions we set). we dream our bioluminescence guides us.

we both sleep with our free hand unusually contorted & pushed to cheek
to satisfy some womb memory (sun-baked rocks, dust lullabies in thick gold air.
we are just summer babies keeping our extremities warm). i want to say dissolved
in dark you are mother/child/sentinel/guide. i want to say our days of blood magic
are behind us but isn’t it all blood magic? all i’m saying is we can be precise (there
are these reasons we slither in & out of our own understanding).

watch from inside as we shift. i want to say what the world thinks it sees
has more to say about the snake charmer than us. we want to be unafraid/swallowed
by ourselves (never-before-documented interdimensional/rare/ravenous). we know
when to let go because we sense our own slowing heartbeat.

ash good is a poet, designer & community catalyst. They are the author of us clumsy gods (What Books Press 2022) & four previous collections. As co-founding editor of First Matter Press, they uplift first-time publishing poets & genre-expanding writers. Their poems have been nominated for Best of the Net & appear in journals including Faultline, Cimarron Review and 45th Parallel. Find them hiking PNW trails & nurturing their domestic plant posse in Portland, OR.

Ed Friedman

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from Midsts

Fifty Preps Toward Kindling

What is the proportion of sepia-toned light
to scorching torrents, every part first rate?
Even before that, go over the bright plan.
Only next time, what? Be a good husband, make faces,
diagram the big thrill I’m sure of, atom and heart,
so basic to talk to. Roll in, grass-stained.
Seriously fucked up? No. Fine, go on,
print words fast, spend money, bank it
on everything we do. I remember myself alone in
darkness with the faintest vertical green line, an uneven touch.
I mean feel past… You see change consumed with rushing,
on edge—in shirt sleeves and string tie. Bottles break
in the alley, but no one listens endlessly
to what they already know. Be glad of that.

How to Answer

Blood is great. So is hair. I squeeze them closed, flat.
Effortless gleam goes out when they become food.
No one asks me about risk or planet history. All my waiting
is reason wearing thin; gleam goes out a little.
Squeeze anything closed about risk to make it bigger.
Thank you for being strange and naturally on fire in your cells.
What we think of at the stream’s bushy edge proves
summer is rarely icy around here, and your fine chestnut hair
flows like ink from a Pelikan fountain pen’s engraved gold nib.
Pigeons dart up together hours before frog croaks get
heavy enough to break. I love your voice boomed against me
and count on its cue for moonlight rims spread an inch.

Spidery Blanks

Discussing track and field with my postal carrier, Chan Li,
I confess deep love for pole vaulters who ready themselves by
visualizing a plush river of stars dividing darker cosmic quarters,
themselves in that flow. More momentum than speed, vaulters sail
over the crossbar, imaginations intact, hardly aware of
what grounds them—home ports, planet mass, parents.
Chan concentrates to sort mail cleanly: intent and consequence.
You don’t learn anything from facts in order; well of course you do.
What’s loudest, after all, ocean waves breaking, church bell tolls,
rocket liftoffs, garter straps snapping, rainfall on skylight glass?
Here’s a postcard for me with a Rancho Palos Verdes return address,
date-time stamped September, I-can’t-read-the-day, 1971,
written in 11th century Japanese “lady’s hand.”
May’s dogwoods bloom first in the palest possible green then turn white.
Sun-bleached hairs on bare, tanned manly arms—mid-summer.

Ed Friedman is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, including: The Telephone Book and Humans Work; as well as Mao & Matisse, Drive Through the Blue Cylinders, and Two Towns (all three from Hanging Loose Press). From 1987 to 2003, Ed served as the artistic director for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City, where he also co-edited the Project’s literary magazine, The World.