Tag Archives: Posit 37

Andrew Zawacki

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from These Late Eclipses

Manufactured Housing

Lit like unto a Vegas casino—permanent sunset, nor window nor clock—day does its un-nuanced thing: frisbee tossing, data drift, a wacky inflatable tube man, breakdancing into the rhodium glare. Over there, in the Öpik–Oort cloud: immobile mobile homes, on rented land.

These Fugitive Apparitions—

pale in the argentine cast of midair—and how we came under their riverine spell, arriving at figurations wherein a trace conceals, or cancels out, the whole. My wife lies down at nightfall: leonine. As an arc of slow light. Breathless in the sharded dark, I read her arousal like braille.

Breech Baby

I remember the doctor tried to flip my younger daughter over—one part primitive wrestling match, his forearms greased to knead the womb, and one part sci-fi shadow play, tectonic on a screen: she wouldn’t budge. We worried then she’d be insolent, hard. Now I think: good.

Verkhoyansk, 100.4º F

A surveying crew is out measuring a fraction of a / fraction of a fraction / of the earth. Case numbers over 14 days are trending +52% +65%. Having shucked the sweetcorn, I chuck the husks at the brink of the woods, as dark is swooning in. The forecast calls for air conditioning.

Droste Effect

Inflicted, inflected: a scar cemented in air. Scare quotes blight my cornea: phosphor luminance, after-eclipse. World not long for this world. Under a hematoma sun, everyone I know’s been broken down, like a cardboard box. My demons hounded by demons of their own.

Andrew Zawacki is the author of Unsun: f/11, Videotape, Petals of Zero Petals of One, Anabranch, and By Reason of Breakings, as well as four books in France. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, and elsewhere. With fellowships from the NEA, Centre National du livre, and French Voices, he translated Sébastien Smirou’s My Lorenzo and See About. Zawacki also edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 and edited and co-translated Aleš Debeljak’s Without Anesthesia: New and Selected Poems. He was a 2016 Howard Foundation Poetry. These Late Eclipses is due in spring, 2025 from Verge Books.

G.C. Waldrep

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exilic topos

the pollen’s spark hidden in the air’s tongue

anterior to the presence that commands begin

in outline, an absence disappearing into voice

shadow-grid, concealed but not unobtainable

Tye River

(1)

light frost, its cincture

the fragrant invisible
at large
among the wheatfolds
a lucid finitude:
golden seals
the weather breaks

(2)

in priory, a held motion
succors
debt’s visible passage

shoaled with all
the organs of mourning

(3)

pity the dull orchard
its sleep-vestry
propped against Art

the mending-flame
or macular escarpment
pronouncing

the hawk’s ablative

(4)

enlaced with hoarfrost
the zodiac glides
to your filament-feet

or, suffer a firmament—

(5)

steady the lamp, friend
steady
the lengthening shadow

metric for flame

Northumberland

living memory of the ash-tree
groping, lending itself
to the gaze’s syllable-descant,

its instant, flung (as if away)

*

winter’s surface, its republic—

 

audible lamp reconnoitering

nucleus of means

the quince at dusk
expressing
its hitherto, its after—

its brief for change

(say it keeps a diary,
a voice
it supersedes)

dwelling beneath
the acknowledgment
of the staved
work, to which
the “truth of things”
condescends—

declines its own
belief in shadows—

nucleus of means
“the work”
(i.e. the vocation)

harvest
of the quince’s
bitter fruit, reversal

paring the terms
from mock solitude—

that wager
of, it would seem,
affirmation—

(or of its shadow)—

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 (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021). Recent work has appeared in APR, Poetry, Paris Review, New England Review, The Nation, Yale Review, Colorado Review, New American Writing, Conjunctions, and other journals. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University.

Alison Stone

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Lost in Translation 4

It’s been cold in the deep sea for a long time,
where beauty is bright and you can’t open your eyes.
The earth shouts at you like a wise woman —
Make yourself different because of your love for me.

People are dead, and this is just the beginning.
The wind has been unhinged lately.
Alarm, and fire approaching.
When it comes, the landscape will listen.

The beaches were abandoned for a lot of money.
The stars went to heaven all the time.
In winter the trees are lonely,
and the Twitter viewers swallow the sky.

(Millay, Keats, Shakespeare, Gluck, Eliot, Plath, Dickinson, Dove)

Lost in Translation 5

There are two types of disasters: women and men.
Love is red and red, and stupid in good time.
Will hatred be more fair than tender love?

Because her hair is beautiful,
his eyes are like water.
Beauty can live on its own anyway.

There are a lot of ghosts tonight. Look in the mirror and answer —
a sad story about moaning and crying in the morning.
Thousands of lakes are filled with salt.

These are crazy, small, and cold times.
Without people and sex, suffering won’t end.
When a new idea comes to you, it comes from common pain.

(Hardy, Millay, Dove, Rich, Shelley, Shakespeare, H.D., Keats)

Lost in Translation 6

Why do you hear a sad song when you hear a song?
Pain caused by the sky
burns like the ghost of a newborn baby.
The world is your widow and she is still crying.

Thinking of my brother’s brokenness,
I pay again like I had never paid before.
He played the melody of sadness and stealing,
and at sunset saw his hands dripping with gold.
As the eagle and blind can see,
the angel of rain is the angel of lightning.
He who follows flowers will never be born again.

(Keats, Dickinson, Shelley, Eliot, Moore, Shakespeare, Langston Hughes)

Lost in Translation 7

We stopped in the sea room.
The baby in the white bed is spinning and moaning,
bouquet of red and brown algae and sea girl,
bright topaz denizen of a world of green.
Disturbed by dreams and tremors of childhood,
she does not fear the men beneath the tree.

The tide wave has opened, and everywhere.
I understand the definition,
the pain that hurts my heart and makes me fall asleep.
Who hoisted the flag today?
You are throwing things every day. Admit
there is no victory.

(Eliot, Keats, Plath, Rich, Dickinson, Yeats, and Bishop)

The Lost in Translation poems were made by putting famous poems (and one song) through Google translate into many languages and back to English, “harvesting” the interesting lines, and making centos. The sources are listed at the end of each poem.
Alison Stone published nine collections, including Informed (NYQ Books, 2024), To See
What Rises (CW Books, 2023) Zombies at the Disco (Jacar Press, 2020), Caught in the Myth (NYQ Books, 2019), Dazzle (Jacar Press, 2017), Ordinary Magic, (NYQ Books, 2016), Dangerous Enough (Presa Press 2014), and They Sing at Midnight, which won the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Award. She won Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize, New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin Award, and The Lyric’s Lyric Prize.

Elise Siegel

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—click on any image to enlarge—

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Artist’s Statement

My artwork has taken various forms over the course of my career. It has at times been more abstract or more representational, and I have employed a range of materials and processes. But my constant underlying motivation has been the desire to give concrete form to fragmentary bits of consciousness: moments of inner conflict, disquiet, ambivalence and unease; and in doing this, create work that generates a psychological tension with the viewer.

Since 2010, I have been creating ceramic portrait busts that explore the abstract edges of figurative representation. Although each of my sculptures is a distinct individual, none are portraits of specific people. Rather, my sculptures are meant to embody familiar psychic states while remaining open-ended, allowing viewers to bring a wide range of projections to the encounter. The challenge for me is to imbue each piece with the immediacy of human experience, and through the process of making, allow each sculpture to project a sense of its hidden life—to create an object that comes to life while remaining a thing.

My visual inspiration comes from a wide range of sources. I’m most drawn to figurative sculptures and sculptural objects that appear to have had some other cultural function, either in ritual or in daily life, in addition to being creative expressions. These are objects that humans have empowered: idols, reliquaries, masks and even toys. I’ve taken formal cues from the abstracted features and exaggerated forms of the Jomon Dogu figures of Neolithic Japan, as well as the hollow eyes of the Haniwah funeral figures from the third to sixth century A.D. For me, these sculptural objects—everything from Renaissance reliquary busts to medieval European iron helmets and masks from many cultures–continue to resonate as their meanings evolve over time.

The meaning of what I do is very much embedded in process—in all the ways I connect to my material. As much as possible, I want everything I perceive and feel and do in this process to be revealed in the resulting object. From early childhood and for most of my art career I have made things out of clay. No other material rivals clay’s immediacy, its capacity to register and record touch, and its ability to capture the experience of making.

I think of what I do as a kind of intimate interaction with the clay: a conversation, a dance, an exploration, or a wrestling match. Mainly, it’s an engagement in the unpredictable present moment, rather than an attempt at control. Hopefully, the resulting sculptures are embodiments of this experience.

My work has led me to think deeply about the transformative nature of our relationships with objects. Objects change us. We connect with them. We animate them, use them, learn from them, and empower them with all kinds of meaning and at times, even agency. This is the realm of the uncanny and the religious ritual. For me it is also the realm of art.

Elise Siegel (born 1952) is an American sculptor and installation artist based in New York. Raised in New Jersey, Siegel attended the University of Chicago, where she was introduced to ceramic sculpture by Ruth Duckworth. From there, Siegel transferred to the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr College of Art and Design) to continue with ceramics and sculpture in earnest. Siegel moved to New York in 1982.

Major exhibitions: Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, NY; Studio10; NY, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Nancy Margolis Gallery, NY; Third World Ceramics Biennial, Seoul, Korea; Garth Clark Project Space, NY; Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan Univ., CT, Jane Hartsook Gallery, NY; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS; and Halsey Gallery, College of Charleston, SC; Laurie Rubin Gallery, NY. Fellowships: Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, and 3 NYFA Fellowships. Other awards: Virginia A. Groot Foundation grant and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Public Collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Chazen Museum, Madison, WI; and Arario Gallery, Seoul, Korea.

Judith Roitman

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Birth

expelled from the body

like donuts

like trees

head

face

shoulders

hair

eyes going: what what

body: still healing

other bodies: insensate
insatiable

Buried

what was buried:

bone shards

nail fragments

bits of meat on bone

nothing does everything

unmoored time/space

Poetry

I asked poetry: what are you
and it slapped me in the face.

Great mounds of grass surrounded us.
Soap spilled on the counter.

What do you want from me
Who invited you here
What house do you belong to

Shimmy

Do you come here often
Do you shimmy in darkness

Do you feed them

cover them
style them

in underbrush
in toadstools
in the birds’

blind beaks behind the toolshed.

Language

Corpses bleed on the roof.
Her hands meet in silence.

Crowds cheer
onions bloom

her battery dies
his hand touches her neck.

A faucet overflows.
A plane moves on the tarmac.

We shuffle into the cabin
a child’s head against window.

Midden upon midden below us
evidence of waste & human condition.

A whale is on the beach.
A crab reaches its destiny.

Two dead seals on the sand — can you see this?
What language do you speak?

Floorboards

I need a light I need a sentence.
Without sentience the hammer grows.

Worms grow in my sight
one leading to another.

They feed as they mate.
Even a dog understands this.

Light underneath the floorboards:
the mark of invasion

the hand aloof
the eye avoidant.

Judith Roitman’s poems have most recently appeared in The Rumpus, Sprung Formal, Otoliths, Human Repair Kit, and DReginald; most recent chapbooks are Provisional (Dancing Girl Press) and Boar King (Magnificent Field). Books are No Face: New and Selected (First Intensity Press), Roswell (theenk Books), and Shard (forthcoming from Chax Press). She lives in Lawrence, KS.

Marie de Quatrebarbes

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from The Vitals

(translated from the French by Aiden Farrell)

September 1

Signs without referent: fauna-fiction. Fugacities rendered post-war. A sign is a party she watches from death. Can it be, one of these terrestrial days, that which produces the hurried disappearance of a connection? For, to exist, magic is uncertain. Put on a drama of the abst. incompletion of a certain img. To exist, can it alone provoke uncert. fate?

September 2

We don’t trick her. And if she falls, we entrust her to the bees. Head forward, horns, bust. An elegance pageant. Figure of speech: circumstances. Everything is free here. Subtlety comes from the word. A fiction advances: the afternoon, the children…fiction to which we can only respond with a nod when a vague idea, a very vague idea, vaporous even, comes to snatch it away. She turns. Her head, always, in the direction of the wind.

September 3

What is eaten: the vitals. The face as such, the end of the year. Empty swamps, their water brackish, irreducibly yellow. When I say “we” (apples)—the little lame duck, the one we put in the child’s pocket—I mean “he” saves himself (it isn’t him). A sort of ecstasy, delusion of ownership—the reflection on an eye grows in the magnifying glass—loss of the image. Code: passing from green to landscape. Variant: she’s that old boy with the blue mouth.

September 4

Flat mouth (option to withdraw). Heard with mouth: porous. In the implementation of wind: window—its soaked nod. Focal: reclusion-adoration. The frozen function of a use.

September 5

This void: my skin illustrated it. We believe we are born, they say, from swarms of bodies, abstract nudities held in compromised steadiness. They call it: dreams. And we caress them. Our hands reach for their eyes. It’s how we treat things (they are not things). The rupture is often cold, this one, the same scream.

September 6

Yesterday a cloud descended on the city. My window turned the world into a thin surface and I wondered: where are the beds? I’m covered in an onion’s outermost skin. My mouth in situ: narrative acceleration. We find time in the same place we left it—in the pots of crayfish. Inside, tonight, the library burned down and the books were devoured by flames. Say again: are mourners ever singular?

This excerpt from award-winning French poet Marie de Quatrebarbes’ The Vitals, forthcoming with World Poetry Books in 2025, is an elegiac long poem in the form of a fragmentary journal that tracks the loss of a loved one.
Marie de Quatrebarbes has published several books of poetry including Les vivres (P.O.L.) and Vanités (Éric Pesty Éditeur), as well as a novel inspired by the life of Aby Walburg, Aby (P.O.L.). She edited an anthology dedicated to contemporary poetry by young French women: Madame tout le monde (Le Corridor bleu).

Aiden Farrell is a poet, translator, and editor. His translation of The Vitals by Marie de Quatrebarbes will be published by World Poetry Books in 2025. He has published two chapbooks—lilac lilac (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs) and organismalgorithm (Fence). Aiden is the managing editor of Futurepoem. Born in France, Aiden lives in Brooklyn.

Karen Holman

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The Avenues

The prints of my fingertips, a lintel.
Your eyebrow

corridor to sleep. Sun on our bed—
my heart burgeons a fig.

On the perch of a lip
my feet dangle in shade > superstition.

This is the last time I’ll think, kite.

A wasp’s venom courses.
Revolving door. Cul-de-sac boomerang.

In its heirloom-storm-cloud
a silver ribbon of cruelty twists

through my DNA.
SNP: a pair

of scissors, wishbones
—hold its hands

the sound of two Xs.
Xs where my eyes would be

if I never left them to look for you.

Invoking the Inconsolable Divine

4 a.m. cat claw
leaf’s-flood-plain divine.
Needle-cluster-beading-
pine-resin divine.
Beseeched, bespoke,
can opener, Narcan-
do: revived divine.
Insatiable, rife-
as-March with pluck
plucky robins,
hands over ears-
eyes-mouth—
hopelessly divine.
Driver and wrench,
scorched, tapped out
—broke-in divine.
Wayward divine.
Ninety-nine named
and galaxy crowned
vaped, empty-bottle, recycled,
wretched, fetching, festering,
quotidian, misquoted and doting
divine. Besotted, becoming,
inexorable, insouciant
exclamation point?
question mark! comma divine.
Periodic table divine.
Elemental divine—
tenacious and tender
anvil and stirrup
jumping drum
arc light, penumbra,
nick-of-time, skin-
of-teeth, eleventh-hour
narrow-escape/lucky break
parking ticket divine.
Crapshoot
radiant radical
sporadic and random
specific, fixer and fix,
jilted—keening and kerned
curious, divisive, derisive
spliced, sparse, parsed
indecent, indifferent,
indicative

Constellations

“Who am I? And how do I know all of this?”

the wind speaks to me, also.     Cities up there
wink out        ghosts burning          although they shiver.
Air conditioning       or shade       makes them cold.

In those days,      chartreuse-new        seven sisters, veiled       in their own breath,
opened and blinked     beating like my fist-wings      with a treasure in it.
[Your Name Here]

Open. Close.            Like luck.          Like I can’t believe it
like transmigration,      like your voice I miss so much       in my nerves
your voice I hear so much     in my body     —     blue skipper    ghost shrimp
horseshoe      crab’s copper bright     vaccine blood.          Can I wink with them?
I am.     Can I wink them out? Yes, when I do.

Sirius eyes me         as ever.         Sleep is houndstooth          sky-forsythia
cemetery pinwheel flowers     animated, again      by air     like us, churn,
magnetized inner core          platelets,         planets,         solar fumes aberrate
mega-fauna turning      on a pin—     wheeling         casting lots,

lots and lots of lots     —the Bull of Heaven’s Jupiter eye, agitated
tail,      whisk glassware         scatter springlights

*         mayflies         *         dragonflies         *

night sky foam          pocked         April dried mud pasture         moon battered,
your face, mother, over my bed.

Frayed          I peer          through         feathers:
every word of this,         contrivance.

*

A pear rests,         amiable as a yellow melon         with two drops of rosewater,
its eyes.         I turn from it          say, it hides from me.

I see and not see.         Cast.          Wandering—

spittlefoam         my poem,         my pear,         my only          you.

Skyfishing                  talon-hooks:

I’m hunting you,         clarity.

Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Marie

(recalled through a window [frame] of fog, morning, dusk, night)
—after Bert Meyers

1.

The Amitie aches of sky

[maybe this, maybe that,
(bobs, broods.)]

The sea ridged
like a mouth’s roof

spilling syllables.

2.

The years the fog doesn’t burn off:
ocean’s eyelid, freeway-sound
algebra in dreams
—your hair, your death

3.

This dirty—little—heart*

pitch deep
attains its vault

a continent of snow—
austere slope

Polaris burning
in a glass
of air.

4.

ntch-ntch-ntch [tsk tsk tsk]
snip, snip, snip;

(whisk whisk)

what was yours now isn’t—

clutch, anyway—
[your flowers of lichen and minerals]:


once pristine blades, cough, glitch, blur
flare, occasionally, nicks, snagged glints, blink.

What doesn’t change?
not words their ([essential]/[accidental])
echo and bounce

(if every abyss had a floor . . .

5.

. . . also, day falls off )

waves light at dusk like streetlamps
to the moon who lit them

that street let me ramble—

like these words

who lit them

*Emily Dickinson

Karen Holman (she/her/hers), is a peer support specialist, collagist, community worker, activist/advocate in Metro Detroit. Her chapbook features in New Poets, Short Books, IV, Lost Horse Press. Her work has aired on NPR and received several Pushcart nominations. She performed original work with Pencilpoint Theatreworks, The Art of Protest Spoken Word, and HERsay in Michigan. She serves december magazine.

Doug Hall

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Time, Memory, and the Winter Oaks of Olompali Valley

I.

Standing among the oaks of Olompali Valley, I was reminded of a passage from Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. He writes, “I feel there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and are effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.”

 

II.

Clive Wearing, an eminent British musician and musicologist, suffered a brain infection that erased his long-term memory and deprived him of accumulating any new memories. Without recall, each blink of the eye revealed a new scene, while the scene before was entirely forgotten. When asked what it was like he responded, “No difference between day and night. No thoughts at all. No dreams. Day and night, the same – blank. Precisely like death.”

 

III.

Given that we share ninety percent of our DNA with cats, seventy percent with slugs, sixty percent with bananas, fifty percent with trees, forty-four percent with honeybees, and twenty-five percent with daffodils, can’t we fairly say that all living things are connected?

 

IV.

Emerging scientific evidence suggests that the universe is finite – sort of like an expanding, cosmic donut with no edges – and that there is nothing beyond it. But if that is the case, how can the universe, which is some thing, be contained within, and expand into, no thing?

 

V.

The age of the universe is thought to be about 13.4 billion years, which means that the average human life will occupy approximately 0.000000634328358% of cosmological time.

 

VI.

I think of memory as falling into two broad categories: melodic and studied. Melodic memory arises unexpectedly and unconsciously, appearing like the fleeting fragment of a song. Studied memory, ingrained through repetition, is willed into existence by conscious effort. Melodic memory, first cousin to dreaming, stirs the poignancy of remembrance and loss; studied memory provides resources for the challenges of everyday life.

 

VII.

The star named Earendel, located in the constellation of Cetus, is the most distant star ever observed. When seen from Earth, we are looking at light that was emitted 12.9 billion years ago – a mere 900 million years after the Big Bang.

 

VIII.

In several billion years after the universe collapses and memory no longer exists, will the universe, without memory to account for it, have existed at all?

 

 

All images: edition of 6 + 2 APs at 48 x 61 inches; edition of 10 at 20 x 24 inches

Doug Hall, a media artist, photographer, and writer, has an extensive history spanning over fifty years. His work in diverse media is held in numerous public and private collections in the United States and Europe, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, and Tate Modern. His autobiography, This Is Doug Hall: A Memoir is being published by ORO Editions and will be available by mid-December 2024. He is represented by Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco and Benrubi Gallery, New York. He lives in San Francisco.

Jeff Friedman

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How to Talk

Give up on drawing breath from your chest. Give up on bringing it up through your throat into your mouth. Give up on your tongue touching your teeth or the draw gate of your glottis opening and closing. It’s not about the lips either. The lips are for kissing if you can find someone to kiss. Forget about the sound of your voice speaking, how it rises and falls like birds flying against a strong wind. Forget about the soft voice you sometimes use to make an impression. The noise from others drowns it out. Imagine pronouncing a single phoneme, then another and now you have a word and more words. Imagine the words drumming into sentences. Let your mind raise its voice and shout sentence after sentence so those around you nod in agreement or smile their acceptance. And even if no one can actually hear you—now you’re talking.

Done Time

Done talking nonsense. Done with brittle tongues and bad brewers, with broods of chickens scratching the dirt. Done with the darkness at the center of darkness—it may be another kind of light. Done with drone mosquitoes buzzing at the windows—and the drones that unload exploding packages. Done with the birds delivering diseases, the doctors painting masterpieces—their floating deathbeds. Done with the wisdom of oracles whose disembodied heads bob up and down in the roiling river, singing their cliches like prophecies. Done waiting for justice to knock Humpty Dumpty off his wall, for his shell to be shattered—the yolk smashed. Done believing that there is a period at the end of a war.

What Her Hand Says

Her hand opens and closes: yes when she opens it, no when she closes it until the loose bulb of her fist bangs against air and collapses. When her hands fold together, she is saying “thank you.” When you touch your heart for her and lean over the bedrails, she touches your heart. The nurse dampens her lips with a sponge stick. Even the tiniest hint of food or water would choke her paralyzed throat. When you hold up the laminated alphabet, she struggles to tap the letters and you guess the wrong words again and again until she is almost smiling. She grips your hand and falls asleep in your silence.

Homeland

“You should visit Hungary,” my sister said. “It’s our homeland.” “How can it be my homeland?” I asked. “I’ve never been there.” “Everyone there has dad’s brown eyes and his rock of a chin.” Everyone looks like him and like us.” I peered into my sister’s face and saw my father’s face and then my own. I remembered how my father combed Wildroot into his black curly hair, huffing so forcefully he fogged up the bathroom mirror, how he whipped the comb away, flinging oily drops on the tile floor, how at dinner he inhaled the hot breath of Hungarian stew as though it were the air rising from the earth of his homeland. A country of our people, I thought, everyone looking like everyone else, everyone looking like us—every face a mirror of every face. “Scary, I said. “I’m not going.”

Jeff Friedman’s tenth collection, Ashes in Paradise, was recently published by Madhat Press. Friedman’s poems and prose pieces have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, New England Review, Poetry International, Cast-Iron Aeroplanes That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry, Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny, Fiction International, Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, The New Republic, and Best Microfiction 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship and numerous other awards and prizes. His newest book is Broken Signals from Bamboo Dart Press.

Susanne Dyckman

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from After Effects

&

The power of the mind, the power and weight of the mind which is not
enough, the strength of an hour, the word that ticks off the day, the
pleasure of that word, enough and the dailiness of it, as the joy of
a forgotten treasure, that lost object that finds you again, unexpectedly,
the mind that searches for links, that holds the time that ticks by the weight
of the ticks, the too-loud clock which is not alone enough, but the sound
lingers in the mind that can change too little on its own, that cannot alter stone.

 

there is     sight while
wandering                             the
reminders
releasing             a layer of dust

 

you stop

&

Stuck in a study of weightlessness
I should know my bones are made of water.
Each thing I say or do is new
but the same.
I might take comfort in the learning of things,
push back all curtains and lay down,
embarrassed by so many dead flowers,
never chosen to carry the crown.
Since I must give up what I cannot keep
outside the sky is just blue sky.

left on the skin                                        the trick

of nature

I can almost hear

&

Startled by my own shadow
everything breathing abundance
from the darkness of the rock
to the air’s caresses.
Back through the age of solitude
the prospect is mixed but elsewhere
words painted
upside-down
are telling the story
more beautiful than a circle.

the known and     unknown                could become
a proximity

&

What might fail is of interest, curiosity for what might be overcome
through a body or through points where day meets night, cycles as
a belief or my resolve, excesses to be salvaged like last light fixed but
only for a time, one moment to match the next, time that explains little,
no more than a crow’s sudden rooftop landing, sudden but reversible,
unlike permanence, like water, always water in the end.

couldn’t     but                                       wonder
was it

 

the

puzzled
attempt

&

I am signing a paper without reading it. I am scattering like light,
thought too dark to be survived. Philosophy’s optimism is no longer
enough. I’ve become an expert in subtraction and distraction:
we survive on the tatters of evidence
we survive on the tatters of evidence —
this part here is where in my dreams all I need to do is bend.

 

what was is                       hoarded                      remains

vision

&

The moment just before
an announcement is made,
that it is not the end,
that you cannot see the end,
don’t look at the burden.
Something in you believes
the leaves of the forest the leaves
a parcel of strawberries
animals going about their dailiness
and you say: always I promise.

at this point

 

in

the mind      once more

 

I want                    a flaw

that     touches

Susanne Dyckman is the author of three poetry collections, equilibrium’s form (Shearsman Books), A Dark Ordinary (Furniture Press Books), and, in collaboration with the poet Elizabeth Robinson, Rendered Paradise (Apogee Press), as well as five chapbooks. She has taught in the creative writing programs at the University of San Francisco and SF State University, and for a number of years hosted the now occasional Evelyn Avenue Summer Reading Series. She lives in Albany, California.