Superfund Superfund
If this was all the access you had to sky, looking down through boardwalk boards into a tributary glinting, if this was all the time your calling or had been all this time, and you found it, foundv yourself arrested above an opening, if purgatory were as real as bridges, where would your religion build, in the soft parabola of carriage and suds, or in the hip points your heaviness keeps in counsel with the planks. The mill of spiderlight and curtainwork in one run over the impress of cofferdam in the other. This river in the days left to live, in the leftover days reclamation balances, trains its instrument on a prospect, romantic and pushy plainly. The joinery of the boards is thoughtful, or the prison wish is a watchwork through and through: to guess at the rare punt of a single stick’s bark odyssey, or to separate from the rummage each drifted glyph of superscript and gloss the passage. Drawn through the bothway of the ribs: A breath, and then another. No prior experience knock wood. Not purgatory, but overage.
Sep 18, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Brian Blanchfield
Syria Syria
…and when, then, the imagination is transmogrified in circles of hatred, circles of vengeance and killing, of stealing and deceit? Behind the global imperia is the interrogation cell. It’s not a good story. Neither the Red Crescent nor journalists are permitted entry, the women tell how men and boys are separated, taken in buses and never seen again, tanks in the streets with machine guns with no shells in the barrels because the army fears that those who will use them might defect. Who knows what has happened, what is happening, what will happen? God knows. God knows everything. The boy? He is much more than Mafia; he, and his, own the country. His militias will fight to the death if for no other reason than if he’s overthrown they will be killed, too. “Iraq, you remember Iraq, don’t you?” she shouts, a refugee. Her English is good. Reached via Skype, she speaks anonymously, afraid of repercussions. “You won’t believe what I have seen”—her voice lowered almost to a whisper—“a decapitated body with a dog’s head sewn on it, for example.” Yes, I know, it’s much more complicated than that. “It’s the arena right now where the major players are,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs concludes his exclusive CNN interview. Dagestan—its province in the North Caucasus—is what the Russians compare it to, warring clans, sects; Lebanese-like civil war will break out and spread across the region. Online, a report—Beirut, the Associated Press— this morning, “28 minutes ago. 4 Said to Be Dead at Syrian University,” one Samer Qawass, thrown, it is said, by pro-regime students out of the fifth-floor window of his dormitory room, dying instantly from the fall…
Sep 5, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Lawrence Joseph
Holiday Holiday
The ad for the American moment says, “Make today famous.” (That little nobody!) Bury her under the foundation. Rome did. Have her wear that seasonal affective collapse get up. Keep an eye- in-the-sky on it
Aug 29, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Rae Armantrout
Tiny Gold Dress Tiny Gold Dress
Days so fleet you have to’ve seen unruly ones I do all the time Someone I soon trust puts your hand in mine Just what I’m looking for Start with the body and search me Won’t find me sleeping I dig my six feet and you stand there in your tiny gold dress Can’t believe my eyes Your smile knows Your ever so slight lisp Ahead of me in the opposite direction Big man alerts me I shed little bits of chivalry I caress like one bereaved Forethought and hindsight in the flesh Peanut shells under bed Lamp nearby of fire and roses Ribbons of smoke sketch momentarily an orchid
Aug 22, 2012 / Books & the Arts / John Godfrey
From ‘The Split’ From ‘The Split’
Had you entered the thicket in darkness, had the brambles been swiping your face as you passed, had you been mid-life, not in haze but in crisis, had you no other lens but damage to gaze through, had you—thwacked by branches—entered your true love as your true love cried out with her palm on your face, her heel on the small of your back in the darkness, you might have removed the mask from your visage, the glass from the casement, the scythe from your fist. * We were just two drunk kids parallel parking in the dark, you saying, Are you the one with the low down? Under the burnt-out street lamp us kids. Heron coasted by the house, trailing those long legs. No, never tasted heron meat. Dawn: through the Lincoln Tunnel the mammals and their metal, headlighting 42nd Street. By the way, you weren’t born in Omaha. You said your wife changed her clothes at the wedding site because it was too cold in the car. I heard your anecdote, I learned what was an event to you.
Aug 8, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Susan Wheeler
Flow Dynamics Flow Dynamics
So lightly and invisibly I hardly knew it, river of blood descending without joy back to the heart through the frail vein all that time —the largest of the body— shredded then dissolved (“obliterated”) and there was a sudden seepage into the surrounding tissue instead of the blood pouring out as you’d expect forever before a new vein formed to bypass what was gone like a wide meander even the smallest flood ends, and the river goes straight from that point. But in my case the thin-walled base-ends held forming an anabranch, a section that diverts from the main channel, rejoins it downstream. Local ones can come from, make small islands in the watercourse or flow hundreds of miles like the Bahr el Zeref in the south Sudan that splits from the Bahr al Jabal of the White Nile, doesn’t return until Malakal instead of leaving behind, as it could have with the blood being old, a full-fledged oxbow lake, a little blue scar beside the heart.
Jul 10, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Elizabeth Arnold
Of Time and Intensity Of Time and Intensity
Is Time a dispersion of intensity? For epiphanists, maybe, but not for me— for whom Time is a transposition of immensity into a lower key.
Jul 10, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Peter Cole
Tutelary Tutelary
Solace from anemones, sepals of instinct pushing the air. Why do they matter so much, there in the room at noon while nothing moves around them: scarlet, creams, and burgundies, magenta, bone-white, and bruise-like blues; the wind’s daughter, or bride, for some, for others a temple to the wounds of Tammuz— or living itself, wordless, longing. Where is that luminous lusciousness from?
Jun 25, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Peter Cole
Recipe Recipe
You carry things at a right angle Subtract thirty years Add salt, breadcrumbs; add powdered sugar I walked through the woods there, the fields running under the phone lines, dry but cold, staying inside the tree-line, inside the dream The field side of things felt like early winter in the 1970s Three deer, two waiting on sawhorses, were being butchered in the snow by a couple wearing orange snowsuits There was a child There were statues in the woods with me One had a hand covering his mouth I’d parked near the one lane bridge Hid my car keys up inside the right front wheel-well I used to go on these walks all the time
May 29, 2012 / Books & the Arts / David Dodd Lee
The Road to Hi Hat The Road to Hi Hat
Sunrise hurt the cat-owl’s eyes. Crows go to ground in the slim valley. Past Hard Shell, around through Softshell’s barnless swallows. Transhumance older than the hills: Up the mountain in May to see the spindly sourwood flowers. Down in the fall with the firelit honey. Even the river stones show early autumn: wet scarlet, sugar-maple bronze.
May 16, 2012 / Books & the Arts / Merrill Gilfillan