Tagvverk

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.

 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

**

LAGNAJITA MUKHOPADHYAY is an Indian-born epic poem collage stranger and break-up with America tour—on self-imposed exile from New Nashville, and the author of the books this is our war (Penmanship Press, Brooklyn, 2016) and everything is always leaving (M.C. Sarkar & Sons, Kolkata, 2019), and poetry album i don’t know anyone here (2020). She was the first Nashville Youth Poet Laureate, finalist for the first National Youth Poet Laureate, and Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. With a Masters’ in Migration and Diaspora at SOAS and a Masters’ in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, find her work in Poetry Society of America, La Piccioletta Barca, and Cream City Review, among others. Her latest book Towards a Poetic Memory of Bengal Partition is out with Natyachinta in December 2023. She is the poet-in-residence with the band JAWARI.

How old give me that old feeling

say together
an angry lover of words rots at
the sentence says everybody talks about their
time in the garden
names like Forsythia I hear
and then i hear little mouths say
for a living!
for my special puce olives in their brine

we’re born with an eye color
most of my friends have more than one eye
more than two colored eyes!
I have beautiful taste in the soul
yet this negator did not do it for me
so these days i spend a great deal of time
hazily removing myself
from public databases
so as not to be found

Vile and the viler the better

the extra mess up
your insurance has to make the calm call about
Then you call them back too and begin a relationship with your insurance
small dot on my face have not seen myself in at least as long as the floorboard
reap made of reeds
something else entirely
substitute teachers show up at the door
Locked
I will take my life, I said
And with a suddenness, dinner was paid for
No one knew
The run-off was boilable
A clear, direct thought in having how I would like to end up very very much unafraid of a person
and instead
only the figments that whisk around
causing a confidence leading to snoozing
on the part of whatever’s supernatural
which happens when a feeling conjures at all
The gorgeous chunk of a number
She’s a seven he’s a three
And in their minds a nine, a niner
we squeak for this opportunity to leave the earthly slat
More odor–

I only date nines and tens
it is time to amend myself
the end of writing does not end with me
what a dizzying misunderstanding being a young person has been
everyone clapping for more when the situation calls for it
Of course
And to transition into a new understatement
The only overstatement my unending sexual resumé
you deem me what
you deem me And i shut up

Congratulations winner
Live for that clip again
Live for the reality from then
you too down
I will openly explain each step
an instinct from long ago
but the curtains she said reminded her of eggs
I imagined the edges to nibble at
the crinoline edge
this will be a book about eggs
epically tall
too expensive
to get each word
down how it would be imagined
the licking behind the wind
Wands, vibrators
mickey mouse, the conductor
Fantasia of remembering rape
led up the one turning
Badges and the pageantry of fobs
the low-wrung half-pint
only the Prairie is
i’m thirty
And it no longer can be salvaged
That the programming drove me to my murder
Others’ fantasies about a gridless walden
The Salaciousnesses of a banister
like a cabin to hang on to
Utopia of everyone promising me shelter
or to sort preferred colors of m&m
make room for fuschia correlations; you have hated me into a coma
I am a whore for knowing you
Who stops now?
i disengaged so i’m not so sure what i see
it’s true what people say when they feel terrible
that’s always true
couldn’t we give them that?

I never said it wasn’t the case
I said i’m in pain
The hurt doesn’t have anything
besides its tone

an oboe

no one needs to engage this space
searching for a recipient
you subscribed me to something i don’t trash

pages in my house
no fireplace
you go to kindling
Force a house on me
photograph who looks like me in a way

searching all day through data to hunt for a likeness
My business corrugated and sexual

in its crunchy, resistant argument against air
I can slide down rocks in fluids in rhode island
The escape attempt down into nature
The world is always dying or working toward picking
whether to starve working people
unless they sneak some.

the automatic bloom of an unsatisfactory tea flower
a caffeine wash
for old-ass skin
the skin- a layer onto a computer to protect myself
To think of what a stem could do if
the thought broke
all of the legging flopping at the butt
small, vaginal holes
And I can’t be celebrated for that decision
one must take on other causes
the high-mindedness of the lack of contribution
To the suffering when you can remember how
being completely honest
You have no idea how to solve even small
Bits of burrito falling, tumbling
i could offer
onto the carpet at work
Never use you in writing
Use it but the iconoclast who uses it and makes it cool again
The maximum i have reached is unimportant
When others-it’s true-
remain more capable but don’t have the know how
But would if you explained it once for fifty-three seconds
World overall different let it turn another way
To save us from conventions
Their gaggy pacing
The email chain of expressivity no one liked receiving

My neighbor and his sexist emails in jokes
My neighbor and his racist jokes in emails

To leave your body with another body part in it
Return to a rapist after being raped in an innovative manner
And somehow it becomes oversimplified
The divine experience imparting a lack of entitlement
Some rapist denouncing the skeptical assessment of calling it rape
Because it is not taking place in a classical painting?
Would you scream to get away?
In your parents’ house? No-
In my mother’s house from fear i’d get in trouble?
No
And the chaos of that moment
The living of your lack
of value I set my hands on my lap now
I’m not here to argue with you
The world is over
And we can’t misunderstand another thing
The epic, i fear
On the luxury of miscommunication
I am everything you say i am
If it stops you from hurting
If it stops me from fixing anything
Frozen peas selected one at a time
For paranoid reasons
To eat individually
a particular pang

 
 
 
**

ELIZABETH MIKESCH is the author of Niceties: Aural Ardor, Pardon Me (Calamari Archive). She wrote a minivan opera for Clarice Lispector and held a residency connected to The Bottom at Mass MoCA in 2017. You can find her work in Unsaid, Bomb, The Rupture, Black Warrior Review, Dreginald, Juked, Sleepingfish, and Puerto Del Sol. Her story “The Largesse” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024. Her book, Sobriquet or, The Assalant Uses an Aliad, will come out via Keith LLC.

Fume Lapse
(Jan-June 2022)

 
 

In Fashion

5:52: a pigeon with a leaf hat. Air raid signal at Target. Long-haired elders in camo. No, the other shade of camo.

 
 
 

Telescopic Philanthropy

Language pays it forward, I steal it backward. Summer fog travels downwards, real estate upwards. Please disregard my texts from last night.

 
 
 

A Morning Adventure

15 minutes on one page, clicking on letters with my eyelash. Best burpless mega fatty delivery capsules. I follow the Roomba in my mind.

 
 
 

Quite At Home

Days commuting into each other. Historical light declines to a Rainforest Cafe mist. Blueish tint of glass in the 90s. (The actual 90s).

 
 
 

Covering a Multitude of Sins

You’re one to speak. On command, but whose. This parking garage pagoda: “It’s kind of a god’s god.”

 
 
 

Signs and Tokens

Firehose in an ornate dumpster. MoMa de Chao (Automania). “Mystic, poet, jester” (an ad).

 
 
 

Our Dear Brother

You’re the sophist’s sophist, I’m the whelp’s whelp. Fog drains between us as we sleep.

 
 
 

On the Watch

Overhanging trees holding shadows. Outside my window: “I’m drained. I’m drained. I’m drained.”

 
 
 

A New Lodger

Commercial sub-basement Ascot boutiques. “Yep: Lobster.”

 
 
 

Sharpshooters

What I mean is, the akashic has spoiled, and I’m irrationally afraid of the Dekalb stop. Footsteps at my back. Platform crocs in the heart of empire.

 
 
 

The Ironmaster

It’s like they’re replacing the apeiron, but with what? Look: a men’s health sprinkler system. A teacher’s miserable lanyard.

 
 
 

The Young Man

Revision’s dapple pulses back through the story, decaying sentiment. You know that look when you see it. A history of Loveless acts.

 
 
 

Nurse and Patient

I’m an operative in a diner booth. I am getting therapy on a bench in a corporate plaza, watching the soup timelapse on the smashed MTA wifi hub. Say it together: Loop. Lime. Asps.

 
 
 

The Appointed Time

“If you see something say something.” But how will I know what to say when it appears?

 
 
 

Interlopers

A Romantic period face, a troubadour period face. A gull asleep in the snow.

 
 
 

A Struggle

Days of the desire to discuss ingredients collapsing; frameworks dissolve in an incoherent middle. A couple of gulls ask for a picture. My phone dies when I photograph the sun.

 
 
 

National and Domestic

O sunflowers caged at the patriotic florist’s. Crisis actor at the outdoor dining structure, spot of Hellman’s on his cheek. O the grove this city’s indoor figs could make.

 
 
 

The Letter and the Answer

You said I don’t know how to celebrate the moment, but fireworks seem like the easiest gesture until you see them.

 
 
 

In Trust

“It’s a big nothing and everybody works at it.” Right!

 
 
 

Stop Him!

Vestigial futures dangle, and the vines too, they dangle. Failsons, subject to random search.

 
 
 

Closing In

Airborne concentrations of steel, manganese, chromium. “The world is right here.”

 
 
 

Dutiful Friendship

Poetry, like the internet, like poetry, is where I debase myself to preserve these things, but for who?

 
 
 

Enlightened

The forest that burnt down in highschool is adolescent now, my dad sends a pic. I forget to respond. Nintendo Music That Calms Your Mind When It’s Raining to Relax and Study To.

 
 
 

Obstinacy

Refusal to hold the handrails, stumbling every time the train stops. Of those to whom special thanks is given, special thanks shall be required.

 
 
 

The Track

The dawn bickers with each corner’s stash of shadow. The outsourced passion of relenting. I’m happy for all your actualizing.

 
 
 

Springing a Mine

Everything true is written in another document, which drains into this one as we sleep.

 
 
 

Flight

The sweat stains on the banker’s back are angel wings. That’s nice, but tread carefully, for dreams are an emerald: reversible.

 
 
 

Pursuit

The thing is, so much noise is being canceled here, one could almost quote unquote scream OKAY. As if on cue it would begin.

 
 
 

A Wintry Day and Night

Also, the man with foot rot’s whispered song sounds like my name. Tonight the ruby will visit me.

 
 
 

Perspective

At the testing site I’m sensed by the sanitizer station, my hands overflow with it, what accrues in being dispensed.

 
 
 

A Discovery

Guilt is time directed inwards, which is why it is described as a weight.

 
 
 

Another Discovery

10,000 cratefuls of lavenders pressed in the hole of my phone.

 
 
 

Steel and Iron

Foreground golden buildings, Big Gulp, background rainclouds, sunset, circumflex beads.

 
 
 

Beginning the World

“The poem on the following slide is sad.”

 
 
 

**

JOSHUA WILKERSON is the author of Meadowlands/Xanadu/American Dream and the co-editor of Beautiful Days Press and the journal Works & Days. Recent or forthcoming work can be found in Annulet Poetics, New Mundo, Noir Sauna, and Volume Poetry.

**

SUZANNE HIGHLAND (she/they) is a queer, Southern poet, essayist, educator, and wildlife rehabilitator. Suzanne’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, and it appears or is forthcoming in Apogee Journal, Works & Days, The Journal, Nat. Brut, A Velvet Giant, and in the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart from Foglifter Press, among others. Suzanne is also the voice behind Mortal Lives, an essay series about ecology, money, death and birds. Suzanne’s work has received support from Art Farm, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the 92nd Street Y, Brooklyn Poets, Florida State University, and Hunter College, where Suzanne received the Miriam Weinberg Richter Award upon graduating with an MFA in poetry in 2016. Suzanne lives in Brooklyn and at suzannehighland.com.

The Fish Market

The idea being that people, generally and at short distance
Would start moving away
Repelled by an interior motive impossible to explain
Like flies in the water

The lichen covering the face of rock
Growing away from the plausibility of skin
But nice enough

Each moment is so difficult

In each place at all times
The whole configuration of reality is deciding itself
Building a sky made up a lot like this one
Where I can see cloud after heavy cloud

So much for a brief sort of impression
Wherever you are abstractly I hope you can see the sky
It’s quite warm now
Almost time for dinner

 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 

Lichenologies
for Damian Liu

All over the ground-flaked
green’s initial impulse, the light
creeps under what
is now
suspicious
golden—
impossible proof,
or,
what the snow hides.

Then I
look
for first rocks. Sliding
down the hill,
now first in
the valley sludge—
impossible
green.
Two rats
show their teeth
beneath the roots, into
the melting
afternoon,
turn left,
uncertain moves,
like that.

If the creases
prepare, exasperating,
we’re present. This is
beyond it. In the
red-line cave, words
creep toward
their mossy figures,
suspicious gold.
And here the moon
forms into signs
of movement.
Here the smell
of fresh rot makes
soundings into movement, words form
to rough intention, shadowed cold
in the mediate surroundings.

What
we say
and where we say it. Dripping
on the map, snowy.
We creep down icy
through the tunnels,
swim quick
into the marrow.
Snowy and depth-charged in the evening.
Everything like that.
Speaking
in smaller pieces.
Wetter,
drier.

 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 

Dream Critique

He kept an image of a leaf in mind and eventually we
Moved in and weaned off an older standard and looked

Into those palm-sized mirrors and spied a handcarved case
With a tawdry wind as I heard you call it.

Waited and waited for what I wished for and whispered
Had it not yet dried.

And in a divine capacity he steals your books and tapes
With forethought all throughout and then with a drink,

Wanting all night to hear poems dripping from leaves beside the sea
And you gluing them together.

But something she said that night about materiality and it seemed wrong
It’s our turn to say it now and it seems wrong,

And even ten years post facto in the haze, she was
Improbably brilliant on the sea.

Look now at all that vanity, that lust for fame, look how they vaunt
Their cold cachet

Taking their thoughts remanded but to vomit
The sunken eyes and tints,

And a white stone on a white stone and the planes
On which their fantasies play out.

And now three glasses deep in dreams they say it
But it’s wrong they have no hearts & have no lungs,

Their bottles only bottles and their friends
All wrong, and how can they stand the distance.

Tonight rain drenching a world in which the world
And water that drips from sky onto the leaves,

Sold out of mixed-grain sourdough in a second and that way every
Day another and another.

Picture what all appears to the machine,
Springtime Chicago,

Hour after hour the implosive music…

 
 

**

CARL DENTON is a writer currently based in Chicago. His writing has appeared in The Cleveland Review of Books, MTV News, and 8 Poems.

DECELERATE

juice my life
to the barrage of memories

if / when
i finally surrender

i know
what will flash before me

even when grasping at
this moment

i’m thrilled
& cannot welcome snow

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

TO DISFLOW IMMEASURABLY W THE LIGHTSOURCE

i know   i   am   mortal.  .  .esp in this gloom.  .  .highlights my entrapment yet.  .  .a joyous one i clutter w the things i love.  .  .slang for beauty.  .  .just want laughter.  .  .tilt my chin up.  .  .empty of elixir.  .  .pleasure eludes.  .  .insert delusion.  .  .i have a sweet spot.  .  . devoid of all.  .  .risqué.  .  .withholding no coordinates.  .  .bikini bod or not.  .  .i look bad in red.  .  .draw too much attention.  .  .to evil.  .  . getting this entangled.  .  .end up in a ravine.  .  .intentionally tracing.  .  .the dna i leave.  .  .

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

MIDAIR FEEL

my countryside, my cliff, my cunt

internal non dark ness

made good by sth specific

tiny is the jugular that

whine or no whine

uninterrupts

what hallucination? what apology?

it won’t stop happening, only to happen agin

what i went for legibly illegibly

became pique this point in the cycle

i reinscribe i

“in the name of

 
 

mild adrenaline

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

SELF-STABILIZER

Fruit of my mood. Core pickled with waiting. One pivot turns into a dance. Blend of awkward moves and flow state. The tune in, the waning, the babe inside me wrestles her peaceful sleep. Is the shelter. Sufficient in structure. Pass thru me like the holy or don’t. Consisting of ultimatums I allow. Each stage of lumination. Its moment of. Lighting up this only room. I don’t.

Centralize time. Crystallize it. Risen yet not yet. The protein twists out its strand. Admit to get one step closer to. The heir. Loom that is able to. Give us a form to. Cling to. Deprived of luster. False swan. I spit. On yr wings.

So span. Confronted by a series of wavelengths. On which one should I be on. Testing connections, what they withstand. This hand wonders about its other. In planar in stellar or caught in. What throes. Whirl of info or. Never above a certain threshold I re. Gurgitate what I in. Tend.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

SLOW MO BARB TO THE

heaven cld sound like heaving

assertion vs. doubt

cliché buildup of burnout of

wtv bastion “love that was

 

compelled in the lugnut of sorrow

to carve a glyph in any available surface (puncture wound bc its true

 

the body’s deep red inaccessible inadvertent

truth and reality lumped together like the meat of crab

all signs are there they ask to be heeded

attach so much significance or not-

 

can never be i’m sorry neutral

we huddle as if the bonfire is there

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I KNOW IT’S FORBIDDEN BUT STILL

 
give me a merry go round upon which to sicken myself

 
 

srry for being so obscene-

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

so little to say now, most of it

(not language

 
 
 
 
 
 

jus prickles
of light
signification

 
 
 
 
 
 

**

SOPHIA MARINA is a poet from the Rio Grande Valley. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in 4×4, Annotations, Variant Literature, Candela Review, and Ghost City Review. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University.