The County Seat of Presidio County The County Seat of Presidio County
One thinks of boats this far from water then goes back to just so crushing into sculpture the rear and forward quarter panels of three cars pasteled for half a century by the Big Bend sun, by the windy grit, tarantula spit, and even piercing starlight for that singular space in the mind of art: an abandoned barracks in afternoon’s half-shadow. Even in winter, it’s a long way for the glare to chariot his old welder across the sky. Boyd Elder sweeps the wasps from Prada Marfa a good twenty miles from Marfa proper. Someone else hates that someone by accident swept the Russian schoolhouse everyone loves to hate. A colossal horseshoe crucified with a ridiculous man-sized nail against the sky casts the shadow of a sickle and hammer. Yuccas lean for decades, and the rust on all maybe-likes the sun. After a downpour flees east to Alpine, it’s best to shake your head at the green that nearly tries. It didn’t rain last year, and it won’t rain this year, says the mayor to the hung-over travelers who could be artists, and one of them writes this in a notebook to an angel he saw late last night down the long Judd-red counter of the convenience store, her entire right shoulder’s agave-blue agave tattoo lit by the cash register candy bar light. She bought cigarettes as they locked the doors. Who could know she would come all this way with her soft bangs, her confident nostrils, and that utterly touchable old white sweater? He hopes deeply she might run him over with the land yacht of her prevailing aesthetic.
Apr 12, 2014 / Books & the Arts / John Poch
Mule Mule
The quiet country midnight got quieter. You said, “I hear snow,” and turned on the porch light. Carrot: pillow fight of light out the window. Winters passed. I brought you presents. I kept remembering your magic, hearing the deeper silence. Then one spring you sent everything back. Stick.
Apr 2, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Christina Robb
I, Diet I, Diet
out of this world & out of time & out of love & out of mind & out of the pan & out of butter, out of anger & out of mother, out of the cradle & out of pocket, out of space & out of cash & out of change & out of sight & out of range & force of habit & out of oil & out of whack & out of water & Damascus, out of courtesy & out of shock & out of duty & out of turn & out of tune & out of line & out of the ground & out of his gourd & out of all the possible solutions, out of the ashes & conviction
Mar 5, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Anna Maria Hong
Autumn Journal Autumn Journal
Gingerly the moon moves near the hilltop church and slides around the transept, slow, to peer inside the cloister. No: those are not friars there, but children… outside their nests. She rests against a brim of wind. Their wings are hurt… But lying in ordered rows of narrow beds they’re all asleep, as if they’re tired. Tired from flying, at least in dreams, and so in dreams their mothers hold them close against warm skin. The moon, she listens in. She doesn’t want to wake them, she only wants to see. And then she leaves, but rises high. She needs to make the hilltops gleam, and drape a sheen across the sea, but too she sends a beam back down to where the children sleep. And up she climbs, up through the sky, the high good sky, and searches far and wide to find the stars. Where are the stars? She scans the sky. Where can they be? She wants to tell the faultless virgin stars what she has seen. (translated from the Italian by Taije Silverman and Marina Della Putta Johnston)
Feb 11, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Giovanni Pascoli
Eurydice Eurydice
It’s more like the sound a doe makes when the arrowhead replaces the day with an answer to the rib’s hollowed hum. We saw it coming but kept walking through the hole in the garden. Because the leaves were bright green & the fire only a pink brushstroke in the distance. It’s not about the light—but how dark it makes you depending on where you stand. Depending on where you stand his name can appear like moonlight shredded in a dead dog’s fur. His name changed when touched by gravity. Gravity breaking our kneecaps just to show us the sky. We kept saying Yes— even with all those birds. Who would believe us now? My voice cracking like bones inside the radio. Silly me. I thought love was real & the body imaginary. But here we are—standing in the cold field, him calling for the girl. The girl beside him. Frosted grass snapping beneath her hooves.
Jan 28, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Ocean Vuong
Notes for the Translation of an Ancient Fragment Notes for the Translation of an Ancient Fragment
[She?] pale curtain fire behind it scent of split rock [She] as wind slendered in grass [She] soft path down which [Unknown refrain] Roughened blue [of eyes, of waters?] Steel [of her voice, of weather?]… Apple [her skin? its white cliffs/sting?] the cricket [cricket] climbing All this! [O She!] [Unknown refrain] Sea so blue [a handful, blue] Those glass lips say I shouldn’t say this her blouse slips dawn [or down] Sound [verb] with wide-eyed hands [Unknown refrain] She throws [we throw?] live flowers on fire they [flowers or limbs?] blend smooth as flames Though high stars circling will [how long how long?] pick our bones clean [Unknown refrain]
Jan 21, 2014 / Books & the Arts / James Richardson
Paris! Paris! Paris! Paris!
All reds come in the shape of lips. Even—s’il vous plaît—our shy little Mazovian cherries. So we shall write with a promiscuous tongue and instead of a period—make a lip print. At the railway station buffet in Radom we drink beer, and the world seen through a full mug is yellowed with the fright of Van Gogh, and a mug—mon Dieu!—also has no ear. Paris! Paris! Ai, dana, da dana! We climb atop our dresser stands and dream of the avant-garde’s New Trick: The Straight Line, which is a stem, and at its end hangs a lip-colored cherry. Oh, sweet drop of Marseillaise, little planet of our malignancy, flow down, drop into our thin borschts! We geometricians of form, puddle-jumpers into others’ imaginations, are waiting for you. And let the folk sing along: Paris! Paris! Ai dana, da dana! (translated from the Polish by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer)
Jan 14, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Jerzy Ficowski
Destination Wedding Destination Wedding
Drunk as a persimmon on the wine of Cana or myself, I couldn’t tell— the old pain and the old dream mingled and seasickness threw kisses in shapes upon the wall like shells upon the shore outside the conch- shaped hall in whose pearled hum I danced as if my feet were small and free of gravity as sea lice. When above the palms, horns, drums and silks I heard a creature high in moss- tangled eucalyptus cry for milk— a creature not my own, yet still my milk let down. I looked up and it locked me in a stare, half-child, half-marsupial, that transfixed me on the scallop of the terraced white hotel it squatted on until sure that I had seen it dove back into the lagoon like a weasel chasing an eel ever further into the nature of oblivion.
Jan 7, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Danielle Chapman
The Taiga The Taiga
Cold crown of the world. Boreas exhales the breath that’s preserved him all these years, kept the wolverine alive, and the spruce-blue stars keen as crystals of virgin ice clipping the pines on their northern slopes. Most coverage here is evergreen. It grows in the short day painfully slow, putting down rings, and whatever waxed needles do pitter to the ground lie there still as pickup sticks in the reckoning between two goes, as if the soft lynx left these miles on long exposure. Bison graze, moss-obsessed. Fresh snow settling confuses them with abandoned dens and boulders. A she-bear, snug in the bed of her own fur, lies under stone, four pink cubs assuming their forms faster in her womb than the carcasses that nourished them can decompose. She dreams at double speed of balsam wood, hot piss and foreign males, the planet turning imperceptibly underneath her shoulder. Honey congeals in hives suspended from conifer boughs. The yellow eyes of a Tengmalm’s owl click in the dark like camera shutters.
Jan 7, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Frances Leviston
Helios Helios
Strong horses, Percherons, bred for imperturbability and speed: Aethon, Eous, Pyrois, Phlegon, what names to call a conflagration by. Two decades with the force, and you’d little use for people, but horses, that was a different matter: strong horses, swift as shadows lengthening across the tile bed, a father could not hold them, how could a god.
Dec 4, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Amanda Jernigan