Preface

Ovid’s Metamorphoses begins, “I want to speak of bodies changed into new forms.” Quoted in the poem “Dawn Again,” Ben Meyerson takes Ovid’s words of change, speaks those words of change, forms and re-forms those words. The present issue of Interim comes in a moment of change. Over a year ago, a pandemic began. That pandemic continues, and as statistics and guidelines and vaccine numbers shift, many are taking their first steps outside after a year marked by isolation. We emerge, aware that the world has changed this past year, finding ourselves as reader and writers changed.

As poetry must, the poems of this issue speak of change, metamorphosis, history, and newness inside the weight of history. The poetry of Stephen Bett speaks the words of poets, quoting their lines, transforming their lines, and speaking alongside their speech. The poetry of Thea Matthews and Nicholas Samaras speaks of streets and landscapes transformed and inhabited by protest. The poetry of Rachel Han and Livia Blum and Jay Aquinas Thompson speak of fire, Heraclitus’ element of change, and speak of a transformed environment, the California calendar marked by a season for wildfire.

Dawn Again—we may hope so. Our poets’ speak: “[D]awn upon the flat pasture”—“dawn hidden in the / intricate nerves & / muscles of this illuminated / hand”—“to recapture the category of the hopeful”—“I hope you will remember what is luminous in this new dark. // I hope you will find me on the other side”—“Was that you / who said every dawn was an image of dusk, you who made / yourself an ocean.” From the other side of change, we may speak of new forms. From the other side of hope, we may write and read in hope.

–Andrew S. Nicholson

Associate Editor

Thea Matthews

4 poems

Fractured

Tormented      delusional      once forgotten
once enslaved      in the bottom of a pint
now      I rest in the folding chairs of a basement
where I sip on paper cups of strong
sometimes weak coffee      where I have a good laugh
to the tragedies I sparked from chipped teeth
where I swore to the dead I must draw
a sober breath to repay you for the harm done
I’ve killed all apologies with my bare hands
their funerals      swim through my blood
egotism breeds my weakness      it’s a slow death
from here      yet just for today
from these streets      I have a daily reprieve

Her Breath

Her breath is numbered
like black bodies in the streets
like children stolen by uncontrollable hands   
like wild flowers on newly bought  property

She    is tired   dying slowly

How will we
brace ourselves    
for the impact
of a falling tree 

Will we shatter
windshields of gentrifiers

Will we scream
so loud       
ears will bleed
of white babies
who gawk at the blacks
because they’ve never
seen
someone black before
in the neighborhood

Will we burn
to ashes a city
money-hungry
extinguish enforcement
of a state
used to harass and kill
Latinx and blacks     
the same state
penalizing the diminishing
working class for petty misconduct 

I do not know  
I do know    
another of her death 
is another apartment building     
caught on fire

What’s Going On

With my window open
this timeless bloom of light 
this motif of a balmy
soprano sax resounds
through the emptiness
of a barrel   by the gates
of Brower Park
Mother  mother
the mural across the street
has chipped paint of a
police officer 
a young black boy crying
a dead body     fatally shot
a cop car in motion
Marvin Gaye
was fatally shot by his father
we’re left
with a yearning
for safety
by the curb
sirens rush to death
we have a song sung
for the dead
the mural’s message
disarm community
rely on slave catchers
I mean           police
(still) for protection
Say something   save someone
Our 2nd Amendment
is not a wafer for holy communion  why is God assassinated daily
the American flag half-mast
around the corner
from the mural
Father  father
In mourning we
thicken the wind with a eulogy
hail cement with bouquets
of stargazer lilies   zip-tie
prayers of photocopied portraits
stolen black onyx
those murdered
by what state defines as
state intervention
their enameled eyes
join cop watch 
their smiles linger
the multitude of protests
honoring siblings killed
by the unrest     resting
within confines of a sick mind
racism is a mental illness
the shattered intellect 
fear and power   O
brother brother brother 
there’s far too many of you
dying
what apology
could ever rectify accusations
to only become a corpse
in custody
what settlement could
there ever be to justify
the kidnapping   shooting
shoving the knee on a neck
feel panic   in a last gasp
for breath     before silence
we all scream        I can’t breathe
Don’t punish me with
brutality
a gunshot    
hands behind the trigger
the mural stares across the street
pulls the trigger
on this gun show loophole
stating  33 states allow unlicensed dealers to sell guns without
a background check    or proof of identity
yet
gun-clenching police
still hold onto their pensions
murder justified
in our times    according to the mural   90% of crime  
guns come from other
states via the iron pipeline
while these registered
guns in-state legally kill
unarmed bands    of us
What’s going on 
yeah
What’s going on

Come

We the people     
hyphenated      diasporic
washed up shore from
kidnapping   detoxed in
incubators        
in the cold underbelly of
the city       
in the unity of the spirit in
the sunlight of glistening
spiderwebs      a passionate
procession   gets
a streamline kick drum on a
major highway
the demonstrations have
begun            We rise
barefoot     
legs sprawled      hips
stretched     we refuse to die
alone   
now the ocean floor spreads     
continents question
their boundaries     on new
land water rises or recedes        
We proclaim the power we
have the power to obstruct
white supremacy     
patriarchy     
heteronormativity
our raised fists      shouts
through megaphones
denounce the orthodox     
desist violence      demolish   
all      -isms     and phobias  
We trudge in motion     
as our blood douses the
land      new crust for the
core    

We block presidential alerts     
the featured tan lines     
the humans pretending to
be AI     in the centenaries
of the March
on Washington    Stonewall     
blocked bridges     
hunger strikes     
Taking Back The Night    
pro-peace / anti-war protests       We
say their names       

We remember

Thea Matthews is a poet, author, educator; and currently, an MFA Poetry candidate at New York University. www.theamatthews.com

Sara Ellen Fowler

3 poems

Tempest

—you, me, Celia

Reaching for your deepest voice, you rock yourself
blindfolded in the storm—uncoupling
flashes of light from the ravishing claps

that plunge us back, each, into ourselves stunned brute
as sky. Rain blows down down through the tree cover
and fans across the windows. An elastic waistband

snaps on skin, muffle of the bedclothes on the floorboards.
Celia climbs on top of you, a moth crushed between her lips.
She leans close to your face to exhale broken wings.

Push into her and brighten the air with our hunger.
Not crashing, not safely, I swear, I swear I am
the fevered one on the naked air mattress

slick with premonitions on the rubber bed.
An unwashed quilt plaits my breaking sweat,
you opened a hot hands packet for my socks. Go ruin

a life with sex and songs hissed into yellow pillows.
The thunder turns the air to lace. You monster of thresholds.
Can’t pretend to sleep. Who calls out, who blurs, who laughs into her hair.

Rest

            wings toward the grey daze
right above the tree line.                    Rest cannot

dodge the many minds sharp in air,
cannot sound, cannot envelop

the lowest register of sky.      
                                                 And I lie

beside you. I have the water.
I know

what depth charge is
strapped to the board you wield when you

descend to dreaming.
I pray its wire loop will not hold.

Snare

She tried to take her hands apart
with just her teeth. Only warm-dead. No,

it is the sun coming over our flat roof.
I was going to let myself into my parents’ place to take a good bath.
The steel trap Dad stationed snared her without severing bones.

The raccoon writhed around the porch, scattered
cat food, flipped the cage, fury-flurried, bled to death.

Her gaze materialized from their den in the underbrush,
cooing, chittering into her open-mouthed passing.

I unfastened the capture and wrapped her in my sweater.
I walked her to the cul-de-sac dumpster.

I’ll wash my hands with gin. I don’t care.
Without the camera, there is no ritual.
I track her blood to the screen door

and its inept apertures sifting the sunset.
It falls pink and wrong on the living room floor.

Sara Ellen Fowler is a writer and artist living in Los Angeles, CA. Her work has appeared in The Offing, X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal, RHINO Poetry, and Full Stop, among others. A Community of Writers alum, Sara holds a BFA in Sculpture from Art Center College of Design and is an MFA candidate in Poetry at UC Riverside.

Carolyn Guinzio

1 video

SOME QUESTIONS

Carolyn Guinzio’s newest collection, A Vertigo Book, won the Tenth Gate Poetry Prize and will appear this year on Word Works. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, and many other journals. Earlier books include How Much Of What Falls Will Be Left When It Gets To The Ground? (Tolsun Books, 2018), and Spoke & Dark, (Red Hen, 2012) winner of the To The Lighthouse/A Room Of Her Own Prize. A project about borders, called Fault, received a 2019 Artists 360 grant. Carolyn’s website is carolynguinzio.tumblr.com.

Joni Whitworth and Amelia Ralston-Okabayashi

1 poem

To Eat With Her Hands

Joni Renee Whitworth is a poet and curator from rural Oregon. They have performed at The Moth, the Segerstrom Center for the Performing Arts, and the Museum of Contemporary Art alongside Marina Abramovic. ​Whitworth served as the inaugural Artist in Residence at Portland Parks and Recreation, Poet in Residence for Oregon State University's Trillium Project, and 2020 Queer Hero for the Gay & Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest.

Pacific Northwest-based interdisciplinary artist, designer, musician, and mystic, Amelia Ralston-Okabayashi (aka Mealz) has been honing her skills as a technologist in order to produce interactive new media work that includes installation, experiential events, and multimedia. Originally an electronic musician with a background in digital production, she has evolved her practice to include creative coding, electronic engineering, fabrication, experiential and generative art.

Stephen Bett

2 poems

Jonathan Williams: Polis is Spies

Eighteen months after you left us,
poetry (that abused & discredited substance;
that refuge of untalented snobs, yobs, and bores)
sinks nearer the bottom of the whirling world.

At Brigflatts Burial Ground—Jonathan Williams (with nods to Olson’s eyes & to Bill Lavender)


Eighteen months after you left us,
full coarse bunting, bambaazled to a fault
& by the sound oop norf, you bet
light airs of music / we are left with [1]


poetry (that abused & discredited substance;
try that bused & credit-edited stance
on someone’s else    Try writing a JW poem
Try to imitate one, try to pass one off… [2]


that refuge of untalented snobs, yobs, and bores)
that fugue of lent nobs, juiced gobs w/out scores
blue lives that don’t matter, these eyes on
polis, politeia, la po-lice fook sake


sinks nearer the bottom of the whirling world
down by the docks, polis is spies in lavender ink [3]
only those unborn to the ur-redneck manner would find
this grotesquerie some sort of kicker,[4] nuff at stake


[1] Jonathan Williams, “The Anchorite,” An Ear in Bartram’s Tree
[2] “Can’t be done,” concludes Robert Kelly on JW.
[3] See Bill Lavender’s essay “La Police” (in ID) on the origins of Police as private organisations for property protection on the docks, in factories, etc.
[4] JW, journal entry in Hot What?

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright: Bullet & Proofed

(for Jeff)


The late Jim Brodey once instructed me
on composing a New York School poem:
“Use blue and name a couple friends.”   
This off-the-cuff take is on-the-button.

Bare Season—Jeff Wright (with slight nods to Stein & Stones)


The late Jim Brodey once instructed me
always ride the high octane long-haul on an
uncluttered heart, you’ll be bulletproofed
Blue Lyre pants on fire (all the way to Newark) [1]


on composing a New York School poem:
Here’s the deal. Just wow. That’s it.
Ratchet the vernacular like the dickens [2]
this Mayor of East Village digs Reverdy too [3]


“Use blue and name a couple friends”   
neither quite Warshed up in PoetryWorld
For Stephen—stay excited… all the way to north-
west, & back as far as Yugen (rimes w/ Dōgen)


This off-the-cuff take is on-the-button
so we’ll be tender between the muttons, sign off
righty, we’re gonna end with a friend
yr northern pal posts at two-gun


[1] Three brief notes: Andre Codrescu: “I emptied two magazines of my .380 PRK at Jeffrey C. Wright’s bulletproof poems, and they didn’t make a dent”; Jeff asked yrs truly to proof ’n prune his Blue Lyre ms; & decades ago, before Jeff’s Hard Press hit hard times (funding), we’d planned on a postcard for my poem “Fire Poem: To Newark,” artwork by Denis Lukas. (LeRoi Jones & Yugen also from Newark.)
[2] One almost feels it’s like quoting Joe Biden (“Here’s the deal” & again “Here’s the deal”), but this time we’re quoting lines from this same JW poem in Blue Lyre, which I said to Jeff is “one of the best books of poetry I’ve read in ages.”
[3] JW, the “Mayor of the East Village” (Richard Hell, quoted in Triple Crown).

Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet with 24 books in print. His personal papers are archived in the “Contemporary Literature Collection” at Simon Fraser University. The book Broken Glosa will be out with Chax Press before the end of the year. His website is stephenbett.com.

Adam Day

5 poems

Excerpts from Midnight’s Talking Lion and the Wedding Fire

“Once they fear you, they cannot be contemptuous toward you
anymore,” after parole they go on a journey” to become
capable of think, elsewhere, community, and “The Other.
Meanwhile, great shock when average youth around immigrant
age perhaps realize she is at least not French enough –
the naming action that normally makes things sense fails;
the world which she finds herself, and by which she might
hope to define herself does not exist, as such, so she does not
exist for that world.


~

And what has her parents endure? When she finds the world
considered beautiful, not like, not peopled by those who look
like a group of people othered by a larger section for turning
inward, and away a young faith wanes. And they othered they.
Not unlikely. Finally approached larger but and also. Not
unlikely very people approach them out of bi-directional

isolation; those from outside often do not know how to engage
desire. James Baldwin phenomenon: “Think any purpose to get
another’s matter liberation, for example, it is also a matter of
yours. If you’re working, and we’re working together, and it’s
not just because we’re going to do something for poor people,
but because it’s for each other: to save this, these, rather
frightening years of this almost double-decade.” 


~

Like incarceration America: extra-realism of prisons compels
balking at the resistance of poetry to conventions
of evidentiary writing.” Wright goes on at least among
American poets, the documentary vision intertwined the lyric
impulse with sporadic events of proportion—Depression
struggle: civil always war…readily reminded of Testimony…
of the Dead,” or “Driving Louisiana pass four prisons
in the spirit of manifest public works.” So this is who we jailers
jailed. This is spirit.


~

Meanwhile, only 14.5% Americans live. 54% of whom are not
African American or Hispanic. Wright points out:
Interrelation abuse and the naked eye blaring out statistics
of the developed rate of a distant second. The Association
for Mental Illness has some 70% of youths in state and local
juvenile justice facilities, warehouses for becoming. France
has a poverty of first-generation immigrants in, between, bars,
barred, 70% are Muslim – while comprising only 8 – 10 %
of French fervor.


~

Their cités told him of the incarcerated: “explained that weak
inmates who never receive visits are offered new identity,
a vision inverting order places top bottom” France more
susceptible; outlook of thought unwavering; complimented
by tendencies to mind. “One of the diseases communicated
comes from huddling together in the pale light of insufficient
answer to a question we are afraid. “More conversion
predisposed people with time hands: the more affluent,
imprisoned, underemployed.

Thus, the social associated with susceptibility; the West more
complex than just born insecurity. What gap bridges affluent,
well-placed extremes and the low-income, under-educated
seclusion living fracture. Certain skin tone, last values name
a fit or find in the world in one oneself. This is people media.
Urged color in the West, to join the West.

Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020), and of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Award. He is the editor of the forthcoming anthology, Divine Orphans of the Poetic Project, from 1913 Press, and his work has appeared in the Fence, Boston Review, APR, Volt, Lana Turner, Iowa Review, and elsewhere.

Rachel Han

2 poems

Fire

It began with ghostprints upon the insides
of mountains. Warm clouds of pigment burst from the lips,
over the hands—five-tailed beacons.

*

The first proof of desire is the glow of carbon black and red ochre
against limestone, the earth crawling through its own skin
in a sinuous rhythm. Accelerating until it is unrecognizable
into a never-ending bright. 

*

In thousands of years, some will break what is whole
in attempts to retain a semblance of shadow. Others will close their eyes
and wake from a fever dream.

*

They will reach for each other in the caves.
Like welcoming a lover into the room.

*

I hope you remember what is luminous in this new dark.

*

I hope you find me on the other side.

Blue Séance

My father’s shadow measures the shore’s rhythm until 3am,
lungs burning slowly beneath each pull of the fishing line.

Hands calloused, possessed by time’s weight.
I help him knot a lure’s silver wings as he bends

towards indigo, faithful to the art of vanishing.
I often dream about floods—another world’s ending

folded into sea brine. A cicada hovers beneath
the moonbeam path. This is how my father visits

from the other side: winged instrument,
writing runes on fish scales as coastlines drown.

Forever dissolving into dust before he can finish them.
Ghost-tatters drift skyward, I search for him

in the blue. So many trials to pass through the gates,
only to briefly shift the dark of earth’s exhale—or lift

from the palm trees as a whisper. In a dream,
my father places me onto his shoulders

and carries me toward the deep currents. I trace the outlines
of a sand dollar into the creases of his palms.

After death, there is an ocean.
Standing still, we count the waves.

Rachel Han is a poet and musician living in Jersey City. She received a BA in Political Science from the University of Florida before working in juvenile justice policy as a research fellow and consultant. She graduated with an MFA in Poetry from Rutgers University-Newark in May, where she teaches creative writing. Her work has appeared in Pleiades.

Livia Blum

3 poems

SANTA ANA WINDS PREPARE FOR FIRE

We will go first, on tiptoe, when the sun
isn’t looking. We’ll wear last year’s wings.
We’ll go first, while they’re sleeping. The birds
will know what to do. If they are busy
dreaming, we will gust them awake
and they will escape.
But not yet.
We will let go all of our mouths and
sing open the windows. The trees
that are tired, they will
come down. Dead leaves
in the hallways, all the water
gone missing. It will work. See: we remember
everything that was born and died and what
came before. We have learned how
to haunt, but you are young and angry.
Let us go first. We will send the deer
running, away from the dryland.
The coyotes will know us.
They will howl. We are
the beginning and the end and
in the morning
the people will stand
on their porches, wretched
and feverish, limbs frantic,
scanning the sky,
waiting for you.
Now burn.

BEFORE I FOUND CALIFORNIA,

I found glass in the river, the kind
that grows on trees and falls
in Springtime and this is how I knew
something was wrong: it was blue
and blue and Blue was
the cassette I kept in the tape player,
caressed and choking
with vines. I was trying
to remember the way
back. I planted
wood slats in the water
to grow myself
a house and it was
useless, everything stayed
riptide and blue and I tried
every way to come home
to California. I sewed poison oak
through my eyes, to see
if I could see better. I stopped
wearing shoes. I picked scraps
of light up off the floor. I traded
my hair for gold. I built
a burning in my hands and it hurt and
this is how I learned I could only love myself
on fire, a wind chime dance
of howling, wild brush
fire in my feet. I danced until
I crumpled into ash, until I forgot
I had ever been lost. I found
California and I’m telling you
it was just like the real thing.

THE RISING

Something is bleeding I think because all the maple leaves
are pooling red, in the cracks of the streets and over each
of the children’s chalk drawings. There is a new ghost, or maybe I just
haven’t been paying attention. At night, on the side of the highway I
can see her coming from the east. A gray billowing thing, hands
spreading over the bay, over the dying and the not. I hold the sky
in place with my fingers, pinch it in the corner, and let the rest flicker
in the wind. Maybe it’s true that heaven sometimes looks like
San Francisco. The sky holds its breath and the rain sinks
into the dirt, the caress (or carcass) of a prayer. Up here, I can tell
that something big is hiding from the world. When I walk down the road,
I know I don’t exist and I drink so much light I am soundless, unremembered
wind, hoof prints. I leave words in the redwoods, I walk barefoot
through deer tracks, I am something bleeding, I see
every soul rising, I –

Livia Blum (she/her) is a student, poet, and activist originally from Los Angeles, California. She is passionate about the power of storytelling as resistance, particularly the relationship between writing and environmental justice. She is the recipient of the Emogene Mahony Memorial Prize (2020) and most recently, the Ruth Forbes Eliot Poetry Prize for her poem “Santa Ana Winds Prepare for Fire” (2021) at Smith College. Her work has appeared in Hanging Loose Magazine, and the New York Times Metropolitan Diary.

Jay Aquinas Thompson

2 poems

On Exhalation

wildfire season, Sept 2020

1.
Feel of the dry iris:
six months since
someone crushed the breath out of you


2.
Rills of green bubbles
green glove-feel of the lakewater
breath jetting out


3.
Stars the sun’s size
fated to die
in ringblasts of radiant particulates


4.
The part of her that had already left you
breathing out impatient
pah in sleep


5.
When you sit
you feel the outbreath through the stitches
of old leather


6.
Pyrocumulus:
as laughter is a
sob backwards

fire makes
wind breathe
fire

To the 9 of Wands

Oct 31, 2020
Thoth Deck; “Strength” in Crowley’s cosmology

1.
Strength, don’t desert me ::

I’m slipping down the long arrowshaft, metal singing under fingers :: I’m held up just barely by
the sun tugging at my occiput ::

Brighten, white Samhain sun, I sing screamishly, even as you withdraw, buzzing with your
cohort of ghosts :: Moon, I go on, please don’t drown in the pool I carry in my abdomen ::


2.
Strength, don’t desert me ::

Feel that lean wolfy masculine moon setting in my belly


3.
Strength, don’t desert me ::

That feeling of holding your own erection in your hand :: without the feminine there is no
erection, no form to shape the power at the point where it lances sidewise through matter ::

So I’m getting up, yes, to brush my teeth, coming up with a few kind words, listening to the
maple leaves when they wetly brush me perchance ::

Nine arrowtips :: nine crescents, each cool as a shell-lip, white heatless flames sizzling across
metal


4.
Strength, don’t desert me ::

The sun does not illuminate but is illuminated :: without just a little immanence it’d smash right
through to the other side of the world and I’d crumple again :: the sun, unintubated, sleeps in the
city hospital’s dingy back rooms ::

As it is, I brush for just a second against the uncorroded solar surface, against the shining sun-
face of the compass rose ::

So I have the strength this week, just barely, to squeeze a pillow between my knees, strength to
shower :: strength to let the groan out :: I need so badly that strength that is the one-thing-more,
the 9, the addition you make only after achieving balance! ::

It’s true, I’m in pain :: I need so badly every energy in me to stir its opposite! ::

Strength, don’t go ::

Jay Aquinas Thompson is a poet, essayist, and teacher with recent or forthcoming work in Pacifica Literary Review, FIVES, Passages North, Jubilat, Tammy, COAST | NoCOAST, Full Stop, and Poetry Northwest, where they're a contributing editor. They're a Tin House Workshop alum and have been awarded grants and fellowships from the Community of Writers, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and King County 4Culture. They live with their child in Washington state, where they teach creative writing to incarcerated women.

Jon Thompson

2 poems

Ode to the Wind not in the Pindaric Mode

Something about the wind in winter blowing
through the not-there of a cold afternoon
the rush of it rising and falling stays
in the mind I don’t know how
it manages to be loud and quiet at the same time
it’s mysterious
today I can’t even hear the faint wash of highway traffic outside
my window which is the sound I use to tell myself that
the world still has some predictability to it and that it hasn’t yet
spun off its axis due to an overload of craziness although
in another way the thing we call routine is beyond appalling
O wind I need to apologize for
centuries and centuries of mythologizing
it’s just a sign of how ill-at-ease in the world we are
it’s easier see you as a symbol
than to accept your untranslatable freedom
I’ve listened to your various half-lives
sadness isn’t the right word for it
but it’s hard to disassociate sadness from the crystalline
thereness of being not-there
if you had a mind what word would you use for
a world we weigh down with intention
and many other kinds of heaviness

What We Do and in Doing Are Undone By

If the ships burned if the smoke was more than a funeral pyre
if heaven was not a sacred temple
if the walls did not fall and
trophylessness were the only true end—
this line this life would be an heroic simile that’d go on forever
how nothing is unusual once it happens
that anything can be an occasion
the only wonder is that we still wonder
to the ancients what was extraordinary was not the actions
of gods, but those of humans
just so did the gleam from the polished bronze of their armor
flash through the whole sky, up to the very heavens
they didn’t say “war” they said they “made love
to their swords” Simon Weil
tonight roughly three and a half wars after
your wars with the wind dying down
and the darkness complete and the big military chopper
thrumming the night air overhead as it finishes its rounds
I’m thinking of your life
under strange stars and all the forces
that pushed you from state to state
and not least the force of your understanding of force “it
is that x that turns
anybody who is subjected to it
into a thing” and as if uttered by the angel of history
swept away and blinded by the very force
it imagined it could handle

Jon Thompson’s fourth and most recent book is Notebook of Last Things (Shearsman Books, 2019). His poetry has appeared widely in journals such as American Literary Review, Carolina Quarterly, Colorado Review, The Common, and The Iowa Review. In addition to writing poetry and essays, he edits the single-author poetry series, Free Verse Editions and Illuminations: A Series on American Poetics. For more on his work, go to www.jon-thompson.com

Yan An, trans. Chen Du and Xisheng Chen

4 poems

Tunnel Warfare

I always want to build a subterranean tunnel
Which my rivals and all the antitheses in the universe
Couldn’t make heads or tails of it will by no means
Be like a mole very impetuously concealing
Its timidity at the mere rustle of leaves in the wind
Or be like an earthworm disliking the tenebrosity
In the world for not being fierce enough
Thereby burrowing through the underground
To look for a darker tenebrosity and then dwelling inside
Or be like the underground tunnels in the Qin Mountains
Having perforated the belly of a deity
Tormented by spacious pitch-dark mortifiedness
And vacuously and frustratedly waiting for their retribution

The subterranean tunnel I always want to build
Has been designed in my heart for many years
Located at the extremities of all cardinal directions
And a location without any address
It is by no means abstract instead very concrete
For example it would be right on a precipice
In its leisure time a kind of bird
Never heard of before would fly over
Dwell for a period of time while taking advantage
Of the occasion to reproduce and parent
If it were in a canyon the wild beasts having vanished
In legends would come back crisscross the tunnel
And then disappear without leaving any traceable vestige

For another example if a person is fortunate enough to live there
He could only light the place with candles
And breathe the fragrance and scent of plants
With his cell phone signal automatically vanished
For another instance only I would be familiar with the path to it
The stalkers having been thrown off by me one by one
At crucial moments would abruptly stop
At a crossroad looking right and left
At their wits’ end like blind men

I have always been building such a tunnel
Maybe when it’s finished it won’t come in handy
Or maybe one day actually for no rhyme or reason
I would just want to play the hide-and-seek game with myself
I would go there
To hide away

地道战

我一直想修一条地道     一条让对手
和世界全部的对立面     丈二和尚
摸不着头脑的地道     它绝不是
要像鼹鼠那样     一有风吹草动
就非常迅疾地藏起自己的胆小
不是要像蚯蚓那样
嫌这世上的黑暗还不够狠
还要钻入地里去寻找更深的黑暗
然后入住其中     也不是要像在秦岭山中
那些穿破神的肚子的地洞一样
被黑洞洞的羞愧折磨着     空落落地等待报应

我一直想修的那条地道     在我心里
已设计多年     它在所有方位的尽头
它在没有地址的地址上
但它并不抽象     反而十分具体
比如它就在那么一座悬崖上     空闲的时候
有一种闻所未闻的鸟就会飞来
住上一段时间     乘机也可以生儿育女
如果它是在某个峡谷里     那些消失在
传说中的野兽就会回来     出入其中
离去时不留下任何可供追寻的踪印

比如一个人要是有幸住在那里
只能用蜡烛照明     用植物的香气呼吸
手机信号会自动隐没
比如只有我一个人     才谙熟通向那地道的路
那些盯梢的人     关键的时候被我一一甩掉
他们会突然停下来     在十字路口
像盲人一样     左顾右盼
不知所措

我一直在修造着这样一条地道     或许
临到终了它也派不上什么用场
或许有那么一天     其实是无缘无故地
我只是想玩玩自己和自己
捉迷藏的游戏     于是去了那里
把自己藏起来

Whales

The man living in a desert   
Is witnessing the demise of many lakes
By his side     with his dark blue eyes
As translucent and profound as seawater
He and he    scattered by the sand dunes
Undulating like billows, to different places
Are people without neighbors
Taciturn for a lifetime
And when occasionally meeting together
Will talk about the ocean
They have never seen in a lifetime
The ocean’s dark mass of inky blue
And whales’ astonishing white
And secret prowls as of a warship

The people living in the desert
Comprehend very well the ocean and whales
And converse with each other about the accurate
Inevitable hours of an ocean and a pod of whales
And how they are resurrected and resuscitated
As if awakened, by the melody by a mermaid
On a desperate reef after their quietuses

鲸鱼

住在沙漠上的人     眼看着许多湖泊在身边死去
他的眼睛是深蓝色的
眼睛像海水一样澄澈深邃
他和他     被巨浪般起伏的沙丘分散在各处
他们是没有邻居的人
他们一辈子很少言谈     偶尔相遇在一起
会谈论到终生未见的大海
他们谈论大海
那黑压压的墨蓝
谈论鲸鱼惊人的白
以及军舰般秘密的潜行

住在沙漠上的人很了解大海和鲸鱼
住在沙漠上的人在相互谈论
一座大海和一群鲸鱼准确的死期
以及死亡之后     在绝望的礁石上
由于一条美人鱼的歌唱
那些大海和鲸鱼     仿佛睡醒一样
重又复活的样子

Night Train

Black rails traverse the vast expanse of the white North
Like two dejected human beings
And stretch into the Northern night’s
Tenebrosity not having been serene since last year
The kind of murkiness of the tottering boulders
Having been completely removed from a cliff by sappers

People leaving the North under the cover of late night
With an empty yet weary countenance
Are clinging close to the windows
As if having fallen into memories
They and the lights entrapped in the cars
Are gazing at each other

They just want to look at a place for the last time
(However it is by no means the only objective)
A village with no more signs of human habitation
One confined in its empty houses and deserted courtyards

One abruptly brightened up by the night train
Rushing out of a tunnel
And then speedily left behind

夜行车

黑铁轨经过白茫茫的北方
像两个失意的人
两条黝黑的铁轨伸入北方的夜里
那去年就不再安详的黑暗
悬崖上的危石已被工程兵
通通清理干净的黑暗

那些乘着夜深离开北方的人
他们空洞而疲倦的表情
像陷入回忆一样守着靠近窗户的地方
关在车厢里的灯光
与他们一同注视着     对方

他们只是想最后看一眼一个地方
（不过这绝不是唯一的目的）
一个人烟不再的村庄
一个被关在它的空房子里
和空荡荡的院落里的村庄

一个被冲出隧道的夜行车忽然照亮
又迅速甩在后面的村庄

Place I Passed by Occasionally

It seems to be a once relatively well worshipped temple
Or the courtyard of a man of fame
However it happened in a dynasty having died a long time ago

The dynasty existing once upon a time has vanished into thin air
A place with its owners never coming back again
And having nowadays been handed over to spiders to watch

Where even the scents of humans and ghosts will gradually dissipate
And where woods and slight murderous intentions
Live symbiotically and thrive further and further

It’s certain this place becoming barren for a long, long time
Will never become no matter how long it takes
Wolves’ heaven or fowl’s paradise
At the extremity of the heavens

我偶尔路过的一个地方

好像以前曾是一处香火还算鼎盛的庙宇
要不就是某个有名头之人的院落
但这都发生在早已死去的某个朝代

很久很久以前的朝代  已经灰飞烟灭
一个主人们再也不会回来的地方
一个如今已交给蜘蛛守候的地方

一个人气和鬼气渐渐都要散尽的地方
一个树林子和略微的杀气
相伴而生     越长越旺的地方

可以肯定的是     这个将要长久荒芜下去的地方
再过多久都不会成为天边
狼的天堂
和鸟的天堂

Yan An is a most famous poet in contemporary China, author of fourteen poetry books including his most famous poetry book Rock Arrangement which has won him The Sixth Lu Xun Literary Prize, one of China’s top four literary prizes. As the winner of various national awards and prizes, he is also the Vice President of Shaanxi Writers Association, the head and Executive Editor-in-Chief of the literary journal Yan River, one of the oldest and most famous literary journals in Northwestern China. In addition, he is a member of the Poetry Committee of China Writers Association. His poetry book A Naturalist’s Manor translated by Chen Du and Xisheng Chen will be published by Chax Press.

Chen Du has a Master’s Degree in Biophysics from Roswell Park Cancer Institute, the State University of New York at Buffalo and another from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She revised more than eight chapters of the Chinese translation of the biography of Helen Foster Snow: An American Woman in Revolutionary China. In the United States, her translations have appeared in Columbia Journal, Lunch Ticket, Pilgrimage, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere, her essay was published by The Dead Mule and Hamline University English Department, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Levitate, American Writers Review, and elsewhere, and her poetry chapbook was published by The Dead Mule. A set of three poems co-translated by her and Xisheng Chen was a finalist in the 2020 Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts. She is also the author of the book Successful Personal Statements. Find her online at ofsea.com.

Xisheng Chen, a Chinese American, is an ESL grammarian, lexicologist, linguist, translator and educator. His educational background includes: top scorer in the English subject in the National College Entrance Examination of Jiangsu Province, a BA and an MA from Fudan University, Shanghai, China (exempted from the National Graduate School Entrance Examination owing to excellent BA test scores), and a Mandarin Healthcare Interpreter Certificate from the City College of San Francisco, CA, USA. His working history includes: translator for Shanghai TV Station, Evening English News, Lecturer at Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China, Adjunct Professor at the Departments of English and Social Sciences of Trine University (formerly Tri-State University), Angola, Indiana, notary public, and contract high-tech translator for Futurewei Technologies, Inc. in Santa Clara, California, USA. As a translator for over three decades, he has published a lot of translations in various fields in newspapers and journals in China and abroad.

Hank Lazer

5 poems

from field recordings of mind in morning

if it is to greet the dawn
if that is what matters most
if it is a greeting of the light
if that awakening can be carried into the day
if it is as a lantern or candle held in the hand
if the eyes bear witness to the slow
unfolding the subtle caressing of first light
across the hillside & into the pasture
if often i am permitted to return to a meadow
if the light is the light of mind
& the lantern is the word itself first light & first word
quiet & present as the pasture itself
who sees it & walks here with three brown dogs
along the horizon rings the tone of sudden change
this is exactly what happens
as it so happens

9/15/19
Duncan Farm

if one stares back
what of that life
is there

not emotion but
sensation
recollected in
tranquility
when sensation is
precisely what has
disappeared

& tranquility
hardly the case

or these few words
eyes to mind to heart

yes yes let us
take it all to heart

9/15/19 (2)
Carrollton

as if this light
& what i make of it
were something true
three brown dogs
noses to the ground
we each take inward
a different world
telling ourselves what it is
until we no longer notice
our sudden puzzlement
dawn upon the flat pasture
& the tabletop display
of tightly wound hay bales
living as a way
to bale the miracle
of incarnation
turning with the earth
taking it all inward
to a point of final density
light returned to darkness

9/29/19
Carrollton

“However, now a mountain goat hangs by its horns in emptiness.” <634>


as unto calm
as unto death
as that which
you have been
called to know


near full moon
a walk at mid
night with the
youngest dog
a walk upon
the hillside
a walk among shadowy
shapes a walk
in time among
glistening figures

4/29/18
Carrollton

the hidden gem
is the light of
morning the hay
baler’s row of
yellow discs beside
the giant cedar tree
wild hibiscus
thriving beside the
illuminated farmhouse
gem hidden in
the dreams of the
sleeping woman a
place for shekinah to hide
gem hidden with
three brown dogs at
rest after running the
dew covered hillside at
dawn hidden in the
intricate nerves ligaments &
muscles of this illuminated
hand as its writing
opens up
into the light

6/16/18 Duncan Farm
for Joseph Lease

A Note: These poems are from field recordings of mind in morning, forthcoming from Talisman (2021). Quotations in the poems are from Dogen’s 13th century Shobo Genzo (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye). Carrollton, Alabama (pop. 990) & Duncan Farm (located 15 minutes outside of the town) are two names for the same place and are where the poems were written (or received), typically in early morning.

Hank Lazer’s field recordings of mind in morning is forthcoming from Talisman, his 33rd book of poetry, following upon Slowly Becoming Awake (2019), Poems That Look Just Like Poems (2019), and COVID19 SUTRAS (2020).

Lauren Camp

5 poems

I Want to Remember Us Suspended

My mother died young and since then I’ve needed prodigious
candles. I’ve housed animals with wild eyes. Walked
cracks of pavement beside impatient spirits and returned home
to a wide window. My father consulted a sign on a bus for the date
of his death and then died years short of that. In my mind,
I keep a repository for all I could have said
before the first chip in his memory. I flew across the country
to watch the wrens. Then music stopped being
my vision. We posted on his wall a feeble atlas and saw states
stacked on top of each other. I yawned sleepy with rational
fear, with taking our time. Was it all our arguments
we were crossing? Yesterday’s sweat collects in corners.
After death there’s a thread that just hangs there. A torn seam
to a background. I believe my mother was a charioteer.
I wear the gold chain they both gave me
when I stand in front of an audience, developing fruit from my words.
What if this is a contract? It dangles, bewildered and reaching.

Moist Evidence and Urges

In my village, cows lay down, color-heavy and postured.
I give my love my mutable body—sometimes weak

to the carrying on, other times swelled to the appetite
of wounds. He begins uncovering, pulling

gentle apart the verbs of my center. What if tracing
the labyrinth from knee to suggestion

to rivered bone isn’t enough?
My village is only a church and a circular road.

The village leader is gathering donations.
All this adobe won’t quit crying its rain. Flailed valley

drags its debris. Many homes have gone to mold.
We live in this wilderness with accents.

The rain lays its behaviors to every inch
of ground. Nearby hills beggar to water and the surface

refuses to hold it. My body tucks up small jottings.
I want—but these days find nothing

with intensity. When I touch my love
with both hands, I can confirm the grindstone

of years. His face is a little bristly, his eyes
tired, but light as a lacemaker.

The Sum of the Divisors

We cannot vanish lonely lonely, rode along.
It’s useful to practice being happy. Find six views. A boy
at a mailbox. In red boots. In the story of the past we can be satisfied
with the first place the pace of that clattery town
where we murmured and ate bread with tottering rain atop it.
Tried new recipes for love which turned out to be each time
the syncopation of glasses or the reversing of stories.
In the morning we rolled over. We returned to each single gesture
and so forth, double
the intimate, all a sudden time. We improvised a future
and our wedding song now reappears
on our sheets. In this how long, in this ending of beginnings, we’ve come
to a land defined by drum by flying, flown, by labor seen
through canyon, by will or family wrong. Previous peak
and its palindrome.
Below this devouring sun, this warning sun, this sun
centered now in unsectioned sky above the dry sugar of cedar.
As if it will work, we needle, we no
one. We less, and we do so while we’re folding in
to air and the important rock
and wild clucks in the shrubs, a passing truck with its expansive long before
and the after. Those patterns. There is so much unnoticed dusk as it quick
zippers us in. The trees wear the land. Imagine
the shapes of the multiple normal and present tense. Raucous fences. Only a moon
chiseled to exist. It unpacks slowly.
When I go outside at night, I am alone
in sky’s canoe, and see one star trembling to find the peripheral ship,
the other side, the world,
see it practicing, getting better—

Must Learn Neither

I had plundered past nervous. A tense Walmart truck clanging the interstate. Smoke
gnawing the face of some mountain. America, aromatic

with ravages. In schism. Sacrificed. I stayed
woke most nights near the door. Occupied with every handle. Four years

my father had gone from corridor to quiver and I mustered my saddle
to get to him often. Four years of crinkled conversing.

Yes, and ginger. I shivered through rooms
of my home in the desert with its stoic astonishments

and took on some needles. I couldn’t settle the ache.
The curt country and my family. Every ache size, every shape.

To reset, I’ve come to the distance, to the ocean. To watch it repeat
how to unfinish. I brought with me a light jacket and a thick book

about Agnes Martin. I’m not sure
why I packed it, what it celebrates, but I know the artist

and her simple lines against excess. Know she made
sacred an emptiness. Maybe I’ll hear thin strands of refuge

apart from the chaos that circles. What I want
is nothing. No meaning, no matter, no more. I’ve run away

with the most fragile questions. Haggard
in a small room big enough for a bed

with its modest blanket. I let my watch doze on the sill.
Minor details hurtle over grasses. A windribbed fence.

The land around me tugs. I don’t know it. Fog covers.
Blank space consumes me. Thirsting, I swallow.

I figure every day I’ll navigate to the tail end of this small town,
unconfined. Full of its translucent leavings.

What I want to figure out
is what could be in the neithers. I am entering

a conversation with Agnes for no reason I yet understand. I am not looking
to rivet to her, but to be extracted

from the sharp cuff of politics, of dementia-tweaked
presence, of the gravity of a future that keeps rolling toward me. How do you recover

from a decisive wound? A line, a line, it never leaves you.
A shallow weight, a selfish wait, a clean house,

an undercut. I will claim it. The ocean keeps rising
to the hip of horizon—what does a line lift? What does it break?

Keep in Touch

These days you only have to hold a toothsome anger. Only have to
hold a shifting fence of people. To stand in the frantic wind
with a day boned to the long

tired lines of the morning. Trains rendezvous
with their stations and the trains
beast and rock to the absolute. You only have to be off them. The buses,

the bridges. Around you, others
and many signs at once. You have the vision
to realize all thresholds are doubled. You already know in one city

boys cut ears off dogs. And that’s how you learn to hunger
for nothing. A sleepy
liminal. You home with the man you adore who can

no longer habit these examples. You map for him shelter
in the winter-slow pace of your bed, then tell him to look away
from what is stimulating.

That man, you want him
to recapture the category of hopeful. My god, you watch
as he builds an inventory with the worst

while you pay your devotion to the unbraiding
sun. A moment clamors over each moment. He says a few words
that feel more like graveyards. (Each time you mean word

you write world
and these days you figure you only have to withhold
the world.) You’ve yelled already. You tell him, don’t disappear. All you need

is to hold to the horse
of a word that means landscape or homestead. A word deep
as a pot of stew on the stove. A word and another

to get to the future. You look onto
the snow which has stopped its messing
around with the sky and left sketchy shapes, a sort of orbit.

Lauren Camp is the author of five books, most recently Took House (Tupelo Press), which Publishers Weekly calls a “stirring, original collection.” Her poems and interviews have appeared in Witness, Poet Lore, The Rumpus, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review and other journals in the US and abroad. Honors include the Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, and Arabic. www.laurencamp.com

Nicholas Samaras

4 poems

Book of the Damned

after Malcolm Lowry and Charles Fort

The blackbound copies that became bibles for study.
Learning that skirted between reality and unreality.
The late hours paced through and discussed over.
The blackbound intermediateness of meaning.
Books that were books without the silence.
The arcana of people disappearing in plain view.
Love of the paradox. Elegant disturbance.
The universe of lyric fragments. A luxurious
fogbank coming in from Eastern Europe.
Available and unavailable friendship.
People disappearing in plain view.
Books that allow them to remain.

Colonialism

So much the history of adults:
they colonised my body with their possession,
the bruises from them, the cuts and welts.

The body I lived in that wasn’t mine,
my own body that was taken from me,
held captive to their discipline and temperaments.

They colonised me with their claims, ownership,
subjugation. In this way, my body
was a landmass, a sovereign claim, an occupied territory,

no different from the land I was living on:
California, with its own history of subjugation and ownership,
along with its upheaval and persistence to survive.

Even California protested by earthquake, by tidal wave,
by counterculture, any attempt to cleanse itself
by breathing still in its open spaces.

Likewise, I would learn to live in my own body
without the belt or forced definition.
I would take to the California road and thread my way

to the expanse of myself, shed my clothing
and grow my hair, to become my hair,
assume my own clothing. I would stand for land

and not for country or any anthem. I would be California free
and take back my own language, my own tribal allegiance,
my own embraced history of land, ocean, fern, forest.

Island of Pelicans

(“Alcatraz”)

Go back far enough and every name for land
has an historical translation or an original name.

I loved the history and challenge of this island,
its view of the world without access to the world.

The cold water road
that gullied its bodies, its suicides, its famous inmates.

I loved Alcatraz’s Native American occupation,
the years of its social statement and reminder of history

that doesn’t get spoken. I loved
the salt-infused bars of every cell window, framing

the landscape out of reach, even the guards and their families
on that rock, almost as imprisoned as the inmates.

The thrill of riding the boat out to history,
walking those spectral lines into A Block, D Block,

the mess hall and morgue, to feel up my wife in solitary—
telling her I was taking her to “a small, romantic island getaway.”

To sit on the cement steps of the yard and feel the chill
of what small freedom was like, the sun on my face,

ocean breezes buoying the linens of fog,
the blue and yellow light in the air holding the gliding of pelicans,

the eternal cries of seagulls through our haunted history—
almost endless, almost human.

Ghazal for the Wolf-Image

Below the redwood cliffs of Requa, the bridal path trailed to the sea.
A wolf led me to follow the spouts of distant whales to the sea.

Northern tribes named the wolf-image “Amaroq.” In the midst
of nature and smoke, I came to you, a willing cascade of shale to the sea.

I marveled at the wolf’s sable, loved its tracing of fur, its coat merling,
its brindled grey. I followed him to you, finally availed to the sea.

My desire for you is my desire for freedom. Love, my desire for you
is desire for the boundlessness of love, held naked, unveiled to the sea.

In the gathering silver of waves, we became faunal and pacific.
In the platinum ripple of moonlight, we came, whole and pale to the sea.

I rejoiced to become a dusky body in nature, on a beachhead in Requa.
Each twilight now, we run to the bay’s opening, entailed to the sea.

Take me, woman, as I come nicked to this world, free in your arms.
Amaroq, constant wolf image leading, my secular grail to the sea.

Nicholas Samaras’s book, Hand of the Saddlemaker, won The Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. His next book, American Psalm, World Psalm, (2014) was published by Ashland Poetry Press. Individual poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry, New York Times, etc.

Lane Fields

1 poem

broken crown for lost girlhoods

imagine : cusp of fruition, little uterus
expels possibility with a logic ; instead
you are frozen, amenorrheic, no-one’s

wife ; you will walk ; preordained paths
cut thru woods of dysphoria & clearings
of undisposed clarity, opportunistic heists

& takedowns in the copse ; you will wish
you were never born at all some days &
it is here you die ; they will shake their heads

& say that you could have been the pride
of your family ; but you were a victim
of signal jamming, boy-lines and girl-lines

jangled in the stratosphere ; a girlhood
curdled like indifferent milk, like blood

//

lie down : tangle of vetch, the tiny bells
& fronds ; your body a socket, locked into
God ; in the distance, eyeshine of some unknown

mammal, dance of predator or prey ; nightfall
alights upon the star-dappled woodland
damask ; your teeth sink into duochrome

firmament ; the river & its hushed banter
with the rustling wind become a chorus
of adulation ; the open air cooling

around you ; you find yourself asking
author & architect for more time here
among the macroscopic radiance,

bent skyward into an auroral show ;
& you think maybe it is beginning to snow

//

stipple of fallow memories : these too
will fade ; a force majeure renders machine
-like exertion to survive past this point ;

you wonder if your mother knows ; you always
were a daughter brimming with catastrophe ;
your thoughts loosen like clock hands unwinding

backward thru hours ; you settle in wet ground &
count your breaths dissolving, as if you were
yoked to living ; when you were a young girl,

someone taught you to whistle in the dark
whenever you were afraid, so you emit ghost tones
until the searchlight finds you ; all your life

you will seek the kindness of strangers,
unspooling wild heaven with small fingers

//

in America : blinking bright futures
sit parallel to thruways ; bone-colored
brutalism & the waiting wilderness

juxtaposed in mirror dreams ; mock-orange
& blue larkspur, brilliant feral tendrils ;
trailside findings : creek, culvert, deer

sign ; you were never an equal in this
uneasy romance with your country
because you never knew which of you

was doing the courting ; a mountain tells you what
a road does or cannot ; America takes you back
thru flaxen fields of promise, leads you

to a ditch where you bear down to deliver
a stone ; & you are half girl, half river

//

you kneel to find, to stand ; he enters
& inhabits your body like prayer ;
like prayer, you are captive, torn asunder—

your body lies motionless below you
in an ever-patient bed of blades
of grass ; you fall to follow, understand ;

his belt sings like church bells, he is here,
the lord of hosts ; when he dismounts, you come
back to your body & rise from the green

earth a mother ; he leaves you & you cross
yourself ; you bend to kiss the silver-embossed
oracle, carved into the velveteen altar ;

those who doubt : press your fingers to the mouth
of the wound & believe ; o studded fruit of faith

//

these are some of your names : girl-child, endling,
fawn ; but he knows to call you his mourning dove,
your sweet husband forever ; you tread soft

earth with no blood-trail behind, train of white
tulle a gauzy shadow ; you meet him by
a cluster of erect crosses, due north

of the streambed ; he cannot stop shaking
his head ; your diaphanous gown sweeps low ;
the rings are in his coat pocket ; all you see

is him ; the whole forest fades ; he reaches
a hand to you & you see the way ahead ;
you both move thru the rural winter’s freeze

but you notice you cannot feel the chill
as he guides you down the calvary hill

//

you wake up wrapped in white linens ; your bed
feels new, alien ; the furnace sighs, pushing
heat thru the empty house, which seems bigger

than before ; in your father’s house, there are
many rooms ; you open your eyes & see
the walls covered with clocks, all stopped ; you feel

calmer than you thought you would ; the early sun
breaks thru the blinds & a hundred shafts of light
enfold you ; time to get up, you tell yourself ;

you listen to the kaleidoscope of sounds
outside : the distant chatter of red fox pups
at play, the waking wind rattling the drowsy

trees ; your skin brushed with the cool dew of day
as you walk thru morning’s blue-gold doorway—

Lane Fields is a queer, trans poet living in Boston and a student of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Lane's poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in places such as Hobart, Yemassee, Rust & Moth, and Tupelo Press's 30/30 Project.

Bruce Bond

3 poems

Fable 11

I was reading a book on the brain, heartened by the company

of a body, mine, yes, but a body nonetheless, and so a mystery.  

And my brain said, I know, I too am lost.   Just where in here

does the ghost reside.  Is the self an ache of light in a PET scan

or the whole dark field in which it shines.  I have an idea.  Why

not visit the grave of our father.  And when we arrived, the field

filled with diamonds, bouquets of jewels laid over the names you

could not see to read. They were just that loved.  Here lies…

and then the slowly melting ice of words fading out of practice. 

How terrible the river long ago that opened these scars, the season

of the endless rain, and the bones we loved gemmed the shoreline

of Loch Haven.   Just whose was whose, impossible to tell.  So

the scatter became equally personal, and never personal enough.

And as we gathered the remains, we said a little prayer, unaware

our lips were moving, we whispered, I am sorry, as if anointed earth

spoke through us, whoever we were, to any stranger who will listen.

Fable 14

The guitarist in the window makes a visual music, and sometimes

a voice presses through, sometimes the instrument turns to light

the moment you break its path.  If I were a guitar, I would lay a shade

of midnight in every toy and flower.  I would take on the specter

of the garden the way a radio takes on the news.   Birds gather

at the effigy because someone thought to give it trees.  And yes,

a song could stop us.  It could flutter into the mouths of strangers

who make this marble personal.  Thus begins the back and forth. 

The wordless pick up where we leave off, expanding time a little. 

You can do that.  You can put your hands to the fire in its steel drum

and sing along in silence.  You could stare as one more spoke

in a wheel pinned to the visual music, as everything solid turns to air.

Fable 16

But now and then, a spiritual advisor sends a text.  You

do not know me, he says, but we were flesh and bone

in a former life.  Trust me, he says.  I know you better

than you know yourself.  And as you wipe away the words,

you hear the whoosh of a sea-wave coming ashore.  One,

two, and, god forbid, a million, and your phone turns to

a tiny breathing machine in a hospital wing where no one

visits, save the flowers as they pass the door.  Was that you

who said every dawn is an image of dusk, you who made

yourself an ocean, who surged, finger by finger, across

the cries of love, over and over, until you fell into a mantra,

and the messages piled up for no one, and nothing grew

too tired to sleep, a stranger to your body, your friends,

and a stretch of earth lunged seaward as the tide withdrew.

Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-seven books including, most recently, Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Dear Reader (Parlor Press, 2018), Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse Press, 2018), Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019), Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU, 2019) and The Calling (Parlor Press, 2020). Forthcoming books include Patmos (Juniper Award, U of MA Press) and Behemoth (New Criterion Prize, Criterion Books). Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at University of North Texas.

Ben Meyerson

3 poems

Dawn Again 

I want to speak of bodies changed into new forms…

- Ovid

I

I want to speak of bodies
changed into new forms –
how groundwater seeps into once-empty crevices & the earth
shifts
so that the substrates
squeal & cantillate in new runs;

how wakefulness          untwists me from sleep
leaves me there           

& I am almost something else.


II

I want to speak of bodies
in whom the warp of alteration
finds its phase              emerges            & braids
with what will be –
forms in whom history
circulates ex-tract                     as urge             potential energy
the slope that undercuts an avalanche.

Dawn again.

Dawn               in eye-tufts
mastiff-hackled
declassed when             lifted up:
a room             enclosed
walls bronzed               indemnified by light as if
cuirassed
each crack                    burnished over –

I will be tempted
to put it in my hand & examine it like that

sever it from its roots
& preempt its prior shape

lay down my head                   there
& turn away –

as if there is no more time.

As if I will not be scraped from the surface of what I hold.


III

I want to speak
but my body must forage
& feel another skin before it charts                 
the unkempt sprawl
to be                transfigured
to                     accede
not to look                   but to be the look –

& then a stalled sonority beads up behind the collarbone:

dawn again
in feathery pulses that push
each form        into itself
metastable                   emulsified toward singing –
& I am awake 
always a tendril aquiver in the gusts     
now     a subphonic prosthesis
at the spot where all things torque        but do not break.

The rhythm is a nascent sapling-snap   
tensile where the fibers
creak a haptic schism between beat                  & gap –
    an eked green
when the stem pushes through
& squeezes its soil into             fission so that the elements part:
    hege                 monies
disentangled               but not allayed in the wrench
    of repetition & birth –

    a track              & the foot’s pressure
    untwisted where the roots knot together

          there

          again

    & I am almost something else.

Future-Proofing

Time with you was a callus & a cocoon:
it slowed so that its circulation
petrified
in whorls & tinctured sediment –

night rested where it                 spread             
on beds of shale & spun          
silk before the sun       
packed it down in sheets
& we lived among the weathered ruins
carved & grown by habits of                contact
receptive to touch from within our chassis                  
though deprived of it.

We did not think to protect ourselves
until what was to come
arrived –

all night we took pains to be                 permeable
but when we awoke our breath was twine
& glacial rinds sloughed from the hillsides down
into our mouths            caching silt-trails
& spume on our tongues in                  chalky hillocks to subsume
our saliva with grit                   & milled debris:

we inhaled greedily.

To speak
we dug our way underneath the detritus
then learned to frack affection
up from our lungs
& into the air between us.

Scenario

 I
 
The river just beyond               where              
summer fires have weakened the slopes
debris has bulged
to the outer lip of the bank
we are stopped
something happens with gravity –
hands brush the edge of numbness
light
settles on greyscale
does not change.

In frail shade                at rest              
pale sun webs               through foliage
mottles skin –
patterns winding in swells of breeze     in
the deepening of hours             a caw
from among the trees              
carnage
of a rodent breaching its bush
a vulture’s loping gait               above like
the languorous swoop
of a minute hand on its path.

By the river refusing time
until
hue drains from the world around us –
we squat on heedless stones                  over
the water          watching feldspar dampen to phlegm
peering
into the copse of pines
whose trunks are ashen spars
whose needles
are smudged together like rubbed charcoal:
oneiric spires that dissolve into dim sky
humming with the cold
of other seasons –       
no salve for the desire              no sap
to trap what runs away.

When night arrives our eyes must adjust
to loss              we must squint
for the warmth of bodies –
they respond
they make a music
             we do not know it.

By night there are threnodies
that sound from corded throats
but snag on the gums and
pinch off in glottal wisps –                                                      
the dumb brush of symphonic palms on thighs
dragged skin                 to haul
a dawn ictus from the tar of time
and so              to set things into motion:
flowers stretch until their pollen wicks rust
and curl as       their stems pool
like wax           into earth        
          new seeds
spawn              thickening with age –

all we feel are petals on our chthonic tongues
though the taste
is of chalk and wet grit lapped from the river
whose current is greyed by silt
whose path is clamorous
          with summer
and nameless debris;

all we hear are hours and days
tickling our nostrils like ragweed
at the tangled border of an endless field
compressing pollen to wax in our ears –
and then some chatter from underwater
from the bedded stones and the pine droppings
          some mute chorus
scraping us into light.


II

On the new day
          rapids effervesce in me
headlong amid organs
untrussed
fanned to a rush –

pores fulminate and slacken

          history
mulls in sinew:

land is knotted around me
hunched
incommensurate
my body is midden-weight atop its pallor
          muscles bunched
to trace the lag of air
skinward follicles skittering ajar in the murmur
atria unlaced into a hacked calm.

A colossal illumination
          will helm
this new body into which I
          dawn
parsed in implicate glow
          drawn
like water from the well
          slow     then
streaming from form                to form –

I am raised and razed back into a subject
dune-dry         
rustling with current;

I am a cartridge for unextended light:
the moisture beneath baked sand
a vernal relic petrified in the glacier.

In rivulets
days drip and carve runnels
runnels widen
          to tributaries
the particles skip and rush in herds
conduct sun in flecks with
the slip and sprint of their haunches
          gait uneven
slabbed flanks that glint as they brim and surge against
the pasture that enfolds them               
          the bells round their necks
sounding daybreak and dusk through
          the parched beaks of birds:
they drift          on familiar paths
their current rattles the sturdy wooden fence –
chattel twisting in brusque rebellion
          then    shambling on its way.

We all move
          to where we are going:

the body awakens into its husk
sleeps
          rouses
slips between –

away from me
a crane’s whoop hammers still water
where the river gives way
          to wetland;

each sun falls on the heart
like a hollow tire
          slapping cement.

Ben Meyerson holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and currently splits his time between Toronto,
Canada and Granada, Spain. He is the author of three chapbooks: In a Past Life (The Alfred Gustav Press, 2016), Holcocene (Kelsay Books, 2018), and An Ecology of the Void (Above/Ground Press, 2019). His poems, translations and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in several journals, including Pank, Long Poem Magazine, El Mono Azul, Great River Review, The Inflectionist Review, Rust+Moth, and Pidgeonholes. His debut collection, entitled Seguiriyas, is forthcoming from Black Ocean Press.