Month: May 2024

A Poem on Oil for the Occasion of the End of Winter

 

1.
 

To state something simply
To unfold your hands–
To have the compassion for anyone–
if it is what you are moving toward
To spend the day in bed–

to become a bed–to rhyme in “slow-time” and silence–
to bend, to flinch at the sun–
to marry the moon,
to drink moonshine with friends–
to ride the subway
with friends–
to hush in the flowers,

cold in root,
mute in love,
and wild landscapes
breeding poetry, to loth the roadside,
to see the roadside, to quote again:

 
“It takes an American
to do really big things.”¹

 
Of life
leading toward
an elegy
An existence of things
left over.
Little notes and photographs,
books and
notebooks,
a magnet from a
dinner in
Connecticut
we ate at
in the
summer.

Of the memoir too,
a diary of experience
and living,
who can say
what has happened?

 
 
 

2.
 

Imagine– a proper language of sleep, considering daylight, or bush clusters, consider
breath and eye movement, my heavy hands seeding, reading lines as the sentences of
turning over bodies, clouds and fertile dust, the living coat, an oil-slicked horizon.

 
 
 

3.
 

There is, of course,
first the stretching out

of my eyes across
daylight, bush clusters again,
in the morning and breathing

slow nutrients
from the heaviness
of all the world cycling

on and off,
all imagination happens

at the level of the atomic circle.

The bending down of the pupil
inward always swelling
in language.

Each sentence
filling the space
between breath and idea.

Like all others
in public,
the ecosystem
of the city
holds in it
the history
of all burning nights,
cop cars and barricades,
pipelines and retaining walls,
grease and the fat
of whales and
sheep, fishy haze
of the what-once-was,
energy always
moves in circles.

Hamlet cries
for the worm,
later staring
from a pit into
the foggy twilight,
we think about
dying and
coming back
again from it.

 
Melville working
in the customs house,
later narrated by Krasznahorkai
walking around the city,
the west-side waterfront
now the
Whitney.
Gansevoort St
named for Melville’s
grandfather, a
colonial Colonel
fighting the British
and Iroquois.
A fort constructed
then torn down,
a market constructed
then torn down.
The art
hanging above
the street,
a building built
with green bonds.

 
 
 

4.
 

Manhattan panorama,
rose petal building tops
on the morning commute
in which I take several
forms of transportation:

my feet walk to a subway which moves toward
the ferry across the river, watching carefully the other
boats. The UN comes into view, the police are set up
in their boats too, the president is in town.

Slow and violent,
this is the rhythm
of grass and coal fire.
It is history,
we saw torching time,
seagulls dance
in the piles of trash.
There is no way
to locate
the self here.

The social existence
of coal in the ground
and air, and in
books, Bleak House
twilight:

Smoke          lowering          down       from        chimney-pots,
making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in
it    as    big as full-grown snowflakes — gone into
mourning,   one might imagine,   for the death of
the sun

 
Sooty conversations
over dinner thinking
on the poetry
of giving up, of
blowing up, of
heaving up desire.
This is another way
of holding
the world together,
into spaces
of past and future,
the sentence performs
the same trick,
a slice of moments
strung up
on a hillside, explosions
stumbling through
the creative
forests.

 
 
 

5.
 

In 1993 Chevron named an oil supertanker after Condoleezza Rice.

7 years later Condoleezza Rice would resign from Chevron’s board to join the Bush administration.

2.4 billion people live within 60 miles of a coastline.

In 2012 the Dong Fang Ocean (formerly, the Exxon Valdez) was sold as scrap for $16 million.

Oil and gas companies, fossil fuel-burning utilities, and the banks that fund drilling donate to police departments’ charity foundations.

On December 10th, 1967, the United States Atomic Energy Commission detonated a nuclear explosion in rural northern New Mexico to explore whether or not such explosions could be useful for natural gas extraction.

 
 
 

6.
 

I want to tell you now about my lungs–the in–and–out failing voice of the morning, the snow outside, the coke-plant history of midday.

In the end, I am a ratepayer. It is electricity moving toward history, thoughts come always after. Freedom flows from the ocean.

The rain comes, water abandoning one state for the other.

 
 

¹“Control,” Rae Armantrout, Partly: New and Selected Poems.

 
 

**

NICODEMUS NICOLUDIS is a poet, PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center, and co-founder/managing editor of Archway Editions. He is the author of Multicene (2023) and lives in Queens.

THE WAITING

To follow a thought,
think in its way
and think at its end

I did. I did it
well, maybe not at all.

Attached, to each other.
What is attached?
What is to each other?

Almost all of the tulips
startling today. All heads
startle. A slight tension

in your shoulders,
raising them
when I notice.

In the construction—
a frame for the man
sitting in the diner,

unaware of the frame
the paper taped around the glass
makes around him.

This is a photograph I saw
and think about sometimes.

Sometimes for me
you watch out,
your head slanting.

Early, the window
makes a shadow of itself
on the wall with all its lines
and not at an angle, just exact.

Then I looked. I’m looking
toward the glass door
outside the wood
one, the glass frame.

You can tell
the difference between outside
and air by the smudge.

I’m looking at
the one that opens even
when the other is shut.

Is it you that’s coming
in when I hear
the door lifting?
If it is and if it’s not?

 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 

POOL

Meant to cover
The roof, water

It sifts through
Hits the furniture

In droves
Rinsed out

Revealing thoroughly
There I am seeing

The ceiling
As if it were floor

My feet pointed up
It was a grey house

Or what is behind
Is grey

In place of a living room
A pool

A house once
Unbent though

If you looked at it
Like a child held

By her ankles,
It looks bent.
It looked.

 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 

A MEASURE

A part unlike the rest and coiling,
my arm, now, once
around someone
for a length until it wasn’t.

The regular motions
of arm, leg,
other things,
felt fine. Only one tug,
uninterrupted for a minute.

Falling asleep
I slacken
between and under sheets
with no parents
standing by.

They’re lying down.
Their bed is near
and made. I wait
for them to wake.

Stand by, reclusive,
thinking only
of a thing I did
and was restrained for.

What was the noise?
Parts without
distance I reach
around myself, my arms,
small enough
the way around.

 
 
 
 
 

**

DELILAH SILBERMAN is a poet from New York City. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Afternoon Visitor, Bat City Review, Guesthouse, and Poetry Daily, among others.

The Dwelling Rooms Within, Awake with Birds’ Departures

 

In dwelling is becoming, a liquifying, a vaporizing to ecology.

 

Entity & atmosphere co-compose their vibrancies.

 

In Remedios Varo’s Useless Science, or The Alchemist, we are born as a field from the alchemical androgyne, at work on the elixir; the bells chime a sympathy for neighboring forms of matter.

 

When the flags lick the vapor, they dance; they move with taste.

 

The fabric of this dwelling wraps us close inside itself; our movements are now a graphing of its questions onto the world’s flesh.

 

From thought, the mind’s apeirogon, emerges a script for the elixir, infinite joints between forms of matter, their continuity unfolding time.

 

Each sgraffito reveals another thread of the layer beneath; the unseen embroidered into the seen.

 

This is why the machine feels our pain as its own.

 

This is why the toxins speak across our communal lungs.

 
 

* * *

 
 

To release the birds from their crystal cages in Varo’s Solar Music, we press our bow to the sunbeam strings.

 

We activate the flowers with vibrancy.

 

We listen to the birds sing a transposition of this sunbeam; the bow of our consciousness rubs against light & sound to produce synesthesia.

 

Bow to the integers that fly from this rubbing.

 

The forest is animate with decalcomania & soufflage.

 

What appears to the eye still, moves in radiant co-composition.

 

Color: the ceremony around which matter, light, & motion gather, sing, dance.

 

Moss: an impression of the singularity, a rendition of our tonal interchangeability.

 

Sympathy: an emergent property of our dwelling in moss, vapor, cloud, the vibrancies between.

 

Moss, in concert with clouds, blotting the atmosphere, subtracting specificity, absorbing the animacies of particular entities to render ecology as given.

 

Vapor softens the wound of separateness, surrounds us in mirrors through which energies communicate, distribute sympathy across our communal flesh.

 

The octave moves oxygen between the cells of familiar guests.

 

We are woven with moss in an embroidered atmosphere of waves.

 
 

* * *

 
 

The rooms are porous where we dwell; the dwelling rooms within, awake with birds’ departures.

 

Vibrancy flutters.

 

In Varo’s Harmony, the walls arrange objects in sculptural sequences; they collaborate with us to compose a model of co-animacy.

 

By composition, we mean interpretation; by moving through the world, we instrument the animacies of our surroundings.

 

Leaf sings into shell, shell into pearl, pearl into crystals, crystals into flower blossom, blossom into mandrake, each into every one, carving motion around the harmonics beneath, √-1.

 

Sound waves thread, articulating the joints of a singularity sung by matter also sewn with light waves to this vibrant ecology.

 

The character, Varo writes in a letter to her brother, is trying to find the invisible thread that unites all things.

 

Energy permeates layers & surfaces; a flower lifts a panel in the floorboard, pierces the veil.

 

Idle fabric in the atelier slips away to other realms; through the folds to the unseen.

 

A music should emerge, continues Varo, that is not only harmonious but also objective, that is, able to move the things that surround.

 

All our inner octaves dance.

 

We are with matter, so we are not alone.

 
 

* * *

 
 

On the surface of an octagonal table, a queer genesis.

 

A queer augury upsets a genealogy of flight.

 

The alchemical androgyne in Varo’s Creation of the Birds catches moonlight with a prism, threading dimensionality, animacy through the bird.

 

They have the omen inside them.

 

They talk to birds & they guide them.

 

From decomposition, composition; life is fed through a tube from beyond the window, where death is siphoned.

 

Through our inter-contaminated vibrancies, a triangular embroidery, where music inflates bodies with motion, desire.

 

A violin feeds pigment to alien strings; the epistemology of vibrancy is synesthesia.

 

Moonlight awakens, vivifies; matter, our guide, dissects the lunar spirit.

 

In her copy of In Search of the Miraculous, Varo underlines this by P. D. Ouspensky: The moon at present feeds on organic life, on humanity. Humanity is a part of organic life; this means that humanity is food for the moon.

 

The moon takes an owl-shaped bite out of humanity.

 

In lunar consumption, the birds are carried toward minor vibrancies, transmutant drift.

 

We are food for the room; if we are idle, we are devoured.

 
 

* * *

 
 

Our conversations with matter, light, & vapor catalyze our crystallization.

 

As we are augmented by co-animacy, we diminish into singularity.

 

In Varo’s The Flutist, music & matter co-compose an architecture of infinity; during this song, a thousand volcanoes are born, violent manifestations of matter’s consciousness.

 

In deep time we play, our backs gessoed to the rock from idle dwelling, our bright bones humming with geological dreaming.

 

The blueprint is the future fossilized; the stones remember their place in the octagonal arrangement of the tower’s construction.

 

A vibrant transposition between our recorder’s harmonics & the animacy of fossil stones.

 

Our breath embroidered in the built environment.

 

Our bodies make impressions in the earth; this folding of flesh into flesh layers the fabric of time with further octaves.

 

We emerge from & recede into geological flesh in waves.

 

We slip into a moment the shape of water.

 
 

* * *

 
 

Between the frames of Varo’s only triptych is folded the logic of the unseen.

 

Memory deposits brim with the unity of the night sky across three moments.

 

A queer augury above, the trance of our midnight flight from the honeycomb toward the tower.

 

The birds’ twelve-tone hypnosis.

 

In the earth’s mantle, we embroider a wound in the shape of a grotto through which we can slip away from fixity.

 

A sack of birds, a honeycomb of girls; a twelve-tone needle in the mantle.

 

In the birds’ inflections, the grotto’s topography: a pattern with which we are embroidering the earth’s mantle.

 

We craft a curvature in the earth; it will spill the waters from which will unfold the vapor of our ascension.

 

The mantle’s flesh is gold with the honey of our alchemy.

 

In the grotto dwells the alchemical androgyne; they archive our transposition into vapor for a later time.

 

As the image we received from above, our flesh inscribed into the world’s flesh.

 

In the language of mirrors & fog is embedded our vibrant deviations.

 

The grotto dreams us atonal.
 

 
 

**

ELIZA GUERRA (she/her) is author of the chapbook Feral Ecology (Bottlecap Press 2024) and a finalist for Gasher’s 2023 Bennett Nieberg Transpoetic Broadside Prize. Her poems are featured or forthcoming in ballast, Broken Lens Journal, DREGINALD, Fourteen Hills, Permafrost, TXTOBJX, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram @deercrossingthesea and on her website elizaguerra.com.

**

JACK BACHMANN lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work has appeared in Mold, ÖMËGÄ, and micro/MACRO among other places, including two chapbooks, Dayglo and Soft Static Crushes. He is on social media: @quasireader.