The Pill vs the Springhill Mine Disaster

 
We walked into the pharmacy.
(Oh. I’m starting with “we.” Oh well.)

I bought the pill. It cost me 3.5 times the hourly wage of the clerk who unlocked the case and handled the transaction. I contemplated standing in the pharmacy for 3.5 hours, so as to better “earn” the pill.

He took my pointless contemplating, my body’s stance as it housed that pointlessness, for worry over the pill’s cost. He offered to split it.

Then I contemplated us standing in the feminine hygiene aisle for 1.75 hours. Would rather have spent double that time alone.

It was his whispering. He was whispering a word. It was one of “ours.” One that hadn’t seemed to exist: the word for children one might have had with one’s lover but did not.

He had coined a word for it. Well I’d asked him to. But I had never, ever requested that he say it aloud at an apropos time.

From the pharmacy, to a cafe–

I had bought the one pill. But I’m a nervous eater. Emotional eater.

I was NOT nervous about taking the pill. It was what was happening across from me that I felt…unable to bear.

At the cafe table across from me he was reciting a Richard Brautigan poem. The one that goes something like, When you take your pill I think of all those people lost inside you.

That was the poem he was reciting. To me. For me? It’s not a long poem. One sentence I think. And yet, the stress that this poem’s recitation by the man across from me was occasioning… I decided to chew the pill. A little mastication session, a small violent crush in the grooves of a molar. A commensurately small relief.

I brought my palm to my mouth to take in the pill. But it wasn’t a single dose. It was a handful. Like a whole bunch of tic tacs. Should I–

I had to. Off his loving look, I popped a good dozen into my mouth.

Down there in my sweaty palm a few remained, and so I chewed them too.

I definitely thought, needing at that point to align myself with anyone but him, of texting Kate: “i’m eating morning after pills like candy!”

He was still there, across the cafe table. How was it possible that the poem was still going on…What’s this poem called, dear. He was asking me as if I knew. I did know and he knew I knew. He was, therefore, asking me to be intimate with him. He smiled. Oh how we both loved poems.

–I gave the title to him sweetly, with chipped bits of pill stuck in one corner of my bottom lip. I hoped he would comment on how pale (powdery!) my lips looked.

Ahh yes. He smiled. Sadly. He was very happy to be this kind of sad. All rollicking in hypotheticalness.

He was not– he was. Repeating the poem.

I picked up the cookie on his plate. He loved sweets and sweetly sad things. I was going to let a bite of the cookie just sit in my mouth. Chocolate chip cafe cookie, rather gooey. Let it get stuck to the roof, let it take away all danger of smiling back.

I was going to nod all the way through this second recitation of the Brautigan poem. Mouth closed all over the cookie so as to better contain my despisement.

This despisement was a huge crisis and I needed to work it out quickly. Only hours ago, I’d–
what?
felt so connected that i’d wanted to have with him a theoretical baby?
why had i been like, yeah sure come inside me?
did i want the male’s experience– the fun frisson of uh-oh?
really, no
why did i invite semen into an obstacleless… reticule
“reticule”?
and enjoy
enjoy the idea it was roiling around in there
?
already had kids, already knew then… what?
something about space and time, how time was an annex to space but with kids there was no
…relationship? — between space and time…?
was it a youth-harkening thing
?
ugh maybe

 
One by one the chocolate chips in the cookie were turning into white pills.

It did not occur to me to not continue eating the cookie. Ate the whole thing. (the stress)
By now must have had what? 20? 25 pills?

The first noticeable effect was his head.

I could no longer see around it. It had grown larger. Had become sculptural, a bobblehead that accentuated certain of his features. The haunted sockets. The straight nose reminiscent of the cover drawing on my high school copy of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

The mouth on this head had not been constructed to open. Still the poem blared.

It blared from the large head and yet came across as a murmur. He was a murmurer.

The third recitation of the poem may have only been an effect of the pills. The bobblehead began: First the title, then the poet’s name. Then he reached across the cafe table and took my hand, the skin of which was a demurely chalky dry.

When you take your pill…

Parade loudspeaker volume. Yet the delivery was bedroom.

How–?

Afraid to open my mouth lest I find out I was eating even more pills, I nodded along to the poem.

I nodded. My head now also huge. I could picture what my own benevolent smile looked like when stretched to bobblehead proportions.

Another natant mound of bitterness in my mouth. Somehow three more pills were there, melting.

Sweet love, I asked, can we return to the hotel?

Gigantic nodding all around.

…

After our nap I knew something might still be different. Nearly 30 pills, maybe more, all in a few moments… Perhaps my uterus itself would be languishing between my legs on the hotel sheets.

Or it would be the city’s landscape that had changed. The streets covered in a dusting of hormone, pedestrians’ gonadal activities declining as they waited for the walk signal… And the trees’ remaining leaves– it was November– would be the little foil peels from each pill’s mini blister pack…

But I could see out the window from the bed. The trees had dead chlorophylled matter, not foil. There was no pilldusting of the streets.

There he was, lips very close to my ears, murmuring, murmuring. My uterus was still inside. It was him between my legs. All was the same.

I keep thinking about the word “and.”
This and that.
He and I.
Space and time.
                   and                    are what he had wanted to name our hypothetical children.

 
Days and weeks. He was uncircumcised. His foreskin seemed to have a slot, as though for small coins. Doll coins. It was not a leap from there to pills. I pretended to fall back asleep until he actually did.

When a man recites a Richard Brautigan poem to a woman who is no longer a teenager, little progesterone pills pop up everywhere. Mushrooms after rain. A law of nature.

All I had to do was reach my hand beneath the pillow and feel for three more white pills.

There they were.

I put them one at a time into his coinslot. Like a little jukebox. One song, three pills. (inflation). Maybe his penis would grow as big as his head had. No matter which one I played he was going to say it was “our” song.

 
 
 

**

DARCIE DENNIGAN‘s manuscript Forever Valley was a finalist for the New Directions novel prize this year.

 
 
 

**

STEPHEN IRA is a writer and performer. He is the author of the chapbook Chasers (2022, New Michigan Press) and the zine This Zine Has Everything (Victor Mature Memorial Press, 2023). His poetry and prose have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), the American Poetry Review, DIAGRAM, Fence, the Paris Review, and the Poetry Project Newsletter.

BREAKFAST OF CHIMPANZEES
for Milos
 

Even the dawn here is self-congratulatory
Tuesday the counter-insurgency begins
Here’s to the extinction of all ilks
Semiotics w/semi-automatics
Megadoners pet dog owners
Disambiguation of trees
Or is your brain ok?
Shiver me pundits
Multiple guest
Tripod Elvis
Par is 13

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

HEAD ON A SWIVEL
for Scoots
 

So the working life of a plastic bag is 15 minutes
We are stuck in the Autobiographical Phrase
@ the intersection of Formalism & pjs
The paparazzi face the wrong way
Is unprecedented or car dented
90% of the game is ½ mental
Willows weep cafeterias
The Mechanism yawns
So much to delete
All wires down
Furtherance

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

MY CURRENT ADDICTIONS
for Ludmila Novikov
 

Atomic Fireballs
Fossil fuel propulsion
The very air
Long shot predictions: 2032 will see a Rottweiler elected President
Viewless wings
Speaking of the drivel, tongue & groove
A mishandling of documents
Optical delusions
Weighing the options on a not-so-grand piano scale
The milliseconds left

 
 
 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 
 
 

JET SET FRIENDLY
 

For every entrance an EXIT
Yes to spontaneous eels
All joking aside we debunk the non-existent cushy
Formica calamity
The semi-annual Fraudster Surge
The extended butt call
Neo-deployism
Who knew in walking not to walk but to sometimes run
As every fact turns faucet
Bidirectional hair
The Deep State demands another tweet
Incomplete fraught
Control remoto headbanging robots break camp outside DC come dawn
Broadly speaking, amphibious

 
 
 

**

JOEL DAILEY divides his time between New Orleans and Toronto. His most recent book is New Details Emerge (New Books, 2023). From 1983 to 2021 he edited Fell Swoop: The All-Bohemian Revue, which has since morphed into SWOOPCARDS, a series of letterpress poetry postcards.

 
 

 
 
We love jelly beans. Introduced in 1976, the eight original jelly bean flavors include Very Cherry, Root Beer, Cream Soda, Tangerine, Green Apple, Lemon, Licorice and Grape. Today, the Very Cherry flavor still reigns supreme as the favorite flavor for all ages in the United States. There was a short period of time (1998-2003) when Buttered Popcorn jelly beans won the popular vote. These are some of our “Dream Jelly Beans” as well as a template for anyone to imagine and illustrate their own dream jelly bean flavors.
 
 

**

FICUS INTERFAITH is a collaboration between Ryan Bush (b. 1990, Colorado) and Raphael Martinez Cohen (b. 1989, New York City).

Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Deli Gallery, New York; in lieu, Los Angeles; Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, NY; Prairie, Chicago, IL; among others including Noplace at P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York, NY and In Practice: Total Disbelief at SculptureCenter, Queens, NY. In 2018, they were artists in residence at 2727 California Street, Berkeley, CA and Shandaken: Storm King, NY and in 2022, they were visiting artists at Longform at Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, MI.

from Sentences

**
 

**
JO BARCHI is a writer and editor living in Chicago.

 
 
 
 
 
**
LINDSEY PANNOR is a poet based in Brooklyn, NY. You can find their current and forthcoming work in bæst, Diagram, 240p by 1080press and elsewhere. She’ll begin an MFA at Brown University this fall.

 
 
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**

RYAN SKRABALAK‘s latest books are Levitating Scum (Tree Jumps Rainbow, 2023), in which these poems appear, as well as The Technicolor Sycamore 10,000 Afternoon Family Earth Band Revue and Assembled Climate, both forthcoming later this spring and summer. He currently lives in so-called “Lawrence, Kansas” with his dog, Donkey, where he runs and edits the poetry press Spiral Editions and curates the poetry reading series DOGPARK. He is also an instructor at the University of Kansas, a radio DJ, and an organizer for AFT Local 6403.

Love Letter
 

There is no letter.

 
for 규, no
 

one G would communicate the bend
of 기억, the name

 
of the letter, which bends
between us, means memory

 
serves. the greater
river by feeding the lesser, the

 
many. K would not communicate
your aversion to K’s

 
harshness. To harshness.

 
Q would sound like 규, maybe, but,
unmuted, despite its roundness, staked.

 
in the ground. A tree
by the river at the river’s
branching,

its groundedness, even
tuning fork struck

 
this note through bedrock
rings of

 
규
 

alone would not convey the other
half, the balancing
act of branches

 
that is 원 holding the silence

in

of 이응. In winter a tree

 
still holds its vacance. You
contract s at the edge
of One and grow s outward as
do river s into their s

 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 

The Guard
 

Wood jaw under of

the key
Change s. Keyed
to. The

which-tree
Of the melody ironing
Out—that which is

 
Melodized, unrumpling the

note. C

-arries the paper through a crowd. No
Wind but it rustles the half-past

 
Hour round as
Gone’
s yoke is

 
Greening-in, unfastening—that which
is ours is an

H our cut short. An a.m.
of ours. An amour like a flag. At

Half-mast, us evens,
breaks the remote

 
future I crave
the news—Van, the H
R guy,
Relays
the news of delay. Delays the news

of relay.

Of course it snowed as a matter of

Course, it rained

Fact. Also.

You cannot hear me; you are too tired to

speaking of cars, the cars are

that us streets hiss

 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 

All and Only

Rain without resumable cause. Concentrating fingers fumble. At Mothernode. Syntax problem builds.

Actual attention spreading mode. Heads only requirement. Trees analytic tools for studying air. One of us trains towards others.

All took exemptions. They live in heads rent-free. Woods guy neverminded into that guy. Wash tall quickly wraparound scrub.

Of course: not-perfect mirror. Pin doubles under scrutiny. Not needled by riddles. Rain taken down from the beginning.

Of path through chart. Moving with rain or because. Of deep structure passing into surface. Nodes flash back.

We live in the middle of nowhere. And I can give you rides whenever, wherever you need.

Trees assume grammatical branches. Grammar assumes roots that end. What is optional is eating noodles. With a fork in noodles.

I unbox. But stiff and scrambled. Tree is optional. Green’s descent.

Draw every possible tree as one. Tree. It is so. Non-one.

It somehow barely resembles anything. The last thing to figure out is the words. Leaping out of the last thing’s order. Of anything left.

 
 
 
 
**
 
 
 
 

어디든, 언제나 [wherever, whenever]
 

Was it looking at the speed at which rain through trees

makes sense and it isn’t rain’s speed through trees

or the speed of looking at rain through trees

 

looking for the light pull’s pleasing

weight in my palms counter it

wasn’t light’s

 

pull or push or light, or weight of one’s breathing-concentrate

on palm’s sweating—or sway, I was sweat and swayed with

the light consume me and I blemish that way ants tickle

 

peach ooze down the table’s dwindled

Leg. Loneliness on the clean floor. Radiator’s

outside-my-air voice when I turn to be reminded of the bay in every window, not the machine of me whirring

 

simple stuck wipe up the table leg, song against grains I can’t see

on my knees, desert-vacuumed palm. I half-remember looking up

to feel you there, my admiring your ankles and your knees—how beautifully you are connected

 

to yourself—unclasping the phrase from my some such mouthing. Was it when we crossed

불광천 on those wide-flat stones the current pushed into place you asked me did I like the rain—no,

not rain, but days of it—비 오는 날들—living at the speed

 

they force—yes—we were in one and it appeared to only be stretching on my glasses on the outside

of my breath, it comes taking down the day’s 미세먼지 and the last week of blossoms and the light

I slowed to wipe the streaks you slowed

 
 
**
JED MUNSON is the author of several poetry chapbooks, including Minesweeper, winner of the 2022 New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM chapbook prize. A book of his essays, Commentary on the Birds, is forthcoming with Rescue Press. His writing can be found in Conjunctions, Bat City Review, Vestiges, Annulet, P-QUEUE, and other journals.

THESE DAYDREAMS ARE WELL-PAINTED

and the August sun is quiet

beneath the heat and speed of Nevada

i trace silhouettes of audible mountains

a vestige
where
the geometrician steals my iron spine

 
beetles scrambling

magnified consonants
spiked by hard sand

a gambling swarm
ignored mumbling laughter

spillover noxious language

 

 

insect voices yell complicated double knots

i cut prayers for a stoccato god

scalding pedestrians
shut their blinds

paused suffocated by living room edges

hollow cymbal

familiar smokescreen noises

i am wide awake two stink bugs nauseating

release steam above decorative porcelain

bounty fine fabric of raincoats

strangled by mildewy smells for three days–

 
my blurry radar is showing stones
flattened by the sea salt burden—

vowels to be notated

 
cutting the lawn
is a neighborhood tremor–

 
play rotted bones at dulcet frequencies,

and the fake grass is an irreducible obstruction

next to fallen half-cuttings from dogwoods

i picket the granular bone into fresh sod–

 

 

stress pathology of sewer flows
as an ocean depth synchronizes on a green diamond

i am ditched at the colossus

barnacle lining grafted fields
this grass-sized muted siren is flayed by a monolithic voice

 

 

as oil pools in the base of the frame

 
 
 
i paint a picture of a bull on the ceiling
and there is not enough in the pocket of a giant–

talons of antholites bounce sour sounds
hear
segments of blank space
nestle beneath molting wood sorrels

 
wrought wasps move frenetically collapsed by vacuum

 
 
submerged by the flood of sun rays scorching leather chair

open curtains— shredded

the immutable geometer is killed by his enamel coat

and this rotted obstacle closes

 
i place dynamite on the counter with plaster birds–

of kinetic departures— a trash fugue

curtailed plastics pile up by middle June
weaving against suffocating living rooms

i am poisoned by its asthenic furnitures–

 

 
or a heavy foulness,
anabatic by a multitude of herbs

my words
unfurled
by a ballet

collecting aerial mint tulips, i am staring
into the sun’s mirror

 
phases road blocks
of terror traffic

painting

a splintered geometry

pray to weaved
jams
and fragrance vapor

acid bath

unmetallic
spoiled saint parades a silent February
by dancing jokes
crumpled harmonies

i navigate a bismuth garden,
carved into an unconsulted Oklahoma

 

 

wisteria sensitive to a cataract whistle
my skin is beginning to break off

convergences of rich blooms
disassembled
by page length creases

melting point to stale winters
curved to massive appearances of unfamiliar insects

i live drowsy on heated flatlands
and the geometrician practices

a routine of seeing double—

 

 

---

☉

 
 

**

MAXWELL RABB is the author of the chapbook Faster, the Whirl Wheel (Greying Ghost, forthcoming 2023). He lives in Chicago, leaving his heart in New Orleans and Atlanta. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Action Books Blog, Sleeping Fish, mercury firs, and ctrl+v, among others. He is currently an M.F.A. candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He co-edits GROTTO.

“Ding-dong. / Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.”

My dad is dying. Who will say, Ding Dong! Hark!
Full fathoms he lies? Will it be me, tolling the bell
Since it already tolls for me? In Noah’s Ark

A camel said, “my hooves still feel the bark
And teeth that herded us here. I prefer the desert hell
Where my dying father sang ding dong to a hawk

Circling above as his soul readied to embark
Toward the promised land. But here I dwell
Since bells already tolled for me in Noah’s Ark

To haste hence and wait for the world’s new spark:
Annihilation in the form of power washing fell
Deeds till death. It’s all a ding dong. But hark,

This water I carry I’ve no use for when all is dark
Floodwaters. I will weep till I’m a shell,
A machine for retold tales inside no one’s ark.”

Noah, a father, fated to be a son’s lark,
Woke up naked. His son had a story to tell.
Ding dong, dad, you made me build your boat. Hark!
Toll for this world was my love for your ark.

 
 
**
 
 

“It’s a strange new winter here. You will sleep”

It’s a strange new winter here. You will sleep
And wake up in a body. It will feel as though you ran
All night till you found a lamp lit next to a keep’s

Great gate, opened just enough for one to peep
Inside. You will see a rowdy festival held by a clan
Of new strangers come down for winter sleep

To endure this climate. Food and wine to keep
Them happy, a maskless masquerade for their caravan
That crossed a night to find the lamp of the keep

Welcoming their journey’s end, a herd of sheep
They brought double as blankets. Jealous caveman,
You’ll be the stranger in this new winter. Your sleep

Rudely ended, you will sigh out of your bed leap
And return to the endless cycle of lifespan,
A long night with no lamp to guide you to your keep.

You will suffer it all again as your body weeps
Jumping from one wildfire into another frying pan.
Winter is strange and new. You will choose to sleep
All night to find a lamp as if you’ve a promise to keep.

 
 
**
 
 

“The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit”

Those two stars we wished upon were never stars.
Their distance is measured in fruit flesh,
Nightblue splash no larger than fingertip scars,

Units to gauge lifespans spent in fast cars
Like brutes on planisphere hunting for warm flesh.
Guided by stars, wishing our catch weren’t stars

But anything we could swallow and make ours.
A fruit torn swiftly from the tree is as loud as car crash,
Nightblue bruises the size of fingertips turn into scars.

Hand in hand, our steps slow, guided by distant stars,
The shining tips of a tree we turned to ash.
Those two stars we wished upon were never stars,

But embers of the choice we made as co-stars
In the show at the beginning, God’s big flash
Splashing nightblue with His fingertips of light the scars

That still haven’t healed. And that which we are,
We are. Paradise lost for a fruit tasting ash.
Stars we wished upon the first night weren’t stars.
Our nightblue fingertips are covered in gardening scars.

 
 
**
 
 

“A Quartz contentment, like a stone –”

In the old clockwork kingdom where needles glide
Above a dial like a figure skater’s blades on ice,
The new electric quartz movement set aside

Was kept in a storage below the lake. I was dock-side
And hawk-eyed. Saw the tremble on icy paradise.
I was old. Kingdom ran like a clock. Needles got all to glide,

High as highest peaks. Subroutines couldn’t provide
Answers to the tinny whir in our hearts. Our vice
Under electric neon moved us. The quartz was set aside,

The answer no one liked. To be loved was to abide
And let the water freeze over the watch from which we hide
In the kingdom that once told time. Needles glide

Above a dial more on design than function’s side
Rounding up to the hour when one pays the price,
Quartz moving in to be the body electric’s new heart. A-side

Of the tape is a song about the lake’s lapping tide
That spit out the beat for the skater to stage her device,
A relic of an old clockwork kingdom where needles glide
In new quartz electric. You move or stand aside.

 
 

**

JACK JUNG studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He is a co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books 2020), the winner of 2021 MLA Prize for a Translation of Literary Work. He currently teaches at Davidson College.