My friend the songstress says there is nopoint in writing nature poems anymore, notunless you choke the verses with smoke and oiland insecticides—the Anthropocenedemands a new syntax. These days,she says, the body is everythingit isn’t. The corpse is still a body, but so isthe rapper’s discography and the bicameral legislature—from “Anatomy,” Volume . . .
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Sir Patrick Steward read a Shakespeare sonnet-a-day on Twitter in order to get us through the Covid-19 pandemic. His gravelly yet elegant voice could turn the words in just the right way to make them clear to almost everyone, although sometimes he had to start over, because he tripped on the words. . . .
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I don’t believe in Judgement Day,but there are people who devoutly do.They bank on the dead rising like rehabilitated birds:parrots & finches, tanagers & herons—birds whose necks were broken and then restored.Or the dead rising like repaired robots.The thin pink-colored sugar waterin hummingbird feeders will re-inhabit veins.—from “Erasure,” Volume 61, Issue 2 . . .
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You hold my fists of lonelinessthat clench the clumsy weightof last ditch caresses. Beat intoyour vinyl sheen is the pain I lugto your altar to put the pain inmy hands:busted knuckle,bound wrist, sprained heart,—from “Alva and the Ode to a Punching Bag,” Volume 61, Issue 2 (Summer 2020) Tell us about one . . .
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The famished ermine trimming the patron’s coat was meant as an emblem of wealth. Is this the real-time sorrow and how did Beurer bring it out on the patrician’s face through brumal medieval afternoons when they sit near each other as still as two lemons, —from “An Old Man in Great Trouble,” . . .
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The days had been dry, rainless. And even without rain, there was green there, sprouting in the backyard. That’s what he was thinking about that day and what he was going to ask Dad when he got home. Why the green was sprouting there, right in front of the step where he . . .
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When one braids togethera horseand a fence it isn’t pretty:mangle of mane and wire, twisted legscedar splints. Once on a hillin a far countryI watched some horses across a dust road—from “Range,” Volume 61, Issue 2 (Summer 2020) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.Hmmm. One piece, back in . . .
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You must go to Brno to see the rain. There are writers who have written almost exclusively about Brno and almost exclusively about what it’s like when it rains there. Brno in the rain is a sadder place than anywhere else in the world, but in a less personally inflected way: the . . .
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You unwittingly keep a catalogue of embarrassments on hand, lifetime-deep, ready to be flipped open to any page should the right moment present itself. The right moment is usually wrong, conventionally speaking: the bus driver doesn’t want to hear it, no matter what stop you’re at; stramgers waiting for the crossing signal . . .
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—a window opens and shuts;doors swing open, for a moment winddances in, dancesbackout, and again doorposts, doorposts, and hinges unyielding as warriors, and high doorsills, and locks, locks, like women in armor.— from (siege) . . .
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