One Poem

∩

Tim Livingston (@thee.sweet1e) is a poet and proud Pennsylvanian. As time passes, they are only living among more and more friends.

Two Poems

from “!Scrap Of!”

Watchin family matters like episodes b4 urkel comes in infiltrating the cast like a germinating seed Oh now we’re thinkin about seeds small ones  rows  planted in my tongue in my conch i hear u speaking like the apostles did man give it up   the center of all this is uh the still tracer i gotta circle 8 the lawn uh i ate an orange yesterday fell on the floor yeah like rind scraping cracked linoleum n lint & uh i think   it was messed with man chlorophyll u know   running outta time think we were on the sister again & urkel
& yeah   then it was urquelle the robot man fuckin wild two men in one face

so the sister we were talkin bout the sister
& the seeds behind the teeth little bumps
like pregnant like imagine man like a garden inside yr gums freeky deeky listenin 2 genuwine

so the sister so bout the meeting
u had dreamed it at the dentist ya
dreamed it w/ all my teeth named them too
like puppets like luanne that episode like the manger babies i used to watch that like w/ my sister after m*a*s*h b4 we slept kinda crazy man now that i think bout it she loved luanne

ON TUESDAY 

waving half-mast flags high on the needlepoint of the building across the street from the fourth floor of the hospital. windows bare, nana’s hospital machine lulling into a faint hum, as a man, unsure of himself, oversized suit, sweat on his lip, drops to a knee, & his baby, newly born in the room next door, face like a baby chick, cooing. & in twenty years, when the hospital floods, & his insurance is replaced by competitions on mr beast’s show, & my mother, lottery ticket in hand, complaining to me about the price of a subway foot long sandwich. it’s $5.99, she says, ridiculous. & while i stumble on a rock, face sifting through a hive of flowers, on the flank of a hill—perhaps with a friend or two—or maybe someone i once missed. & when this friend (or maybe friends) lets it be known that it hasn’t been cold in a while & i remember the last time it snowed is the last time my mother, trash bag over the handle of her wheelchair, pink knitted cap, me running behind her, barefoot, fearless, nip of frostbite & awe; & the carrot she hands me, liver spotted, slightly curved upwards like the smirk the snowman gives me as i plant it on his fat face. & when i retract from the mist, blanket bundled around my chest in this swaddle of grief, i draft an email to my therapist, stare at the ceiling & think about the hyena, headstrong in a pack, crying under the cacti, like the rest of us, when alone at the bar, beers deep, some man playing bowie on the jukebox, singing over the riff a half-second too fast, hands banging on the bartop like war drums. it’s very bad. i wish he’d stop. the last time i cried is when i was twenty-four & got the phone call that my mom died & my roommate running into my room, handing me a rubber duck, asking, face tilted in wonder & unknowing that my world (& all the gravel & my bare feet & spit) is gone like when the esthetician, hovering, red rectangle on my chest, hair ripped clean like a house stripped of copper, & a family once seated at the kitchen table before the second eviction, laughing, ignoring that rent is due on Tuesday & does the duck’s face look fat? an innocent inquiry & now maybe i’m laughing or crying or neither. i delete the email & DoorDash some coffee. the delivery driver’s name is Barbara. she looks like a woman i once knew

∩

Kevin Latimer is the author of two books. He lives in Philadelphia, PA. He is an editor at bethh.

One Story

Hombre de burro

There was something about the spandex. Of course the other parts were nice too: the lavender lace patches covering her breasts like translucent mosquito nets, or the silky triangle beginning at her belly button and going down to her pussy, occluding her navel, begging him to rub his cock against the delicate fabric until it was about to explode. Those parts were nice, right, but the thing that drove him crazy was the constricting grip of lycra across the various curvatures of her body. Nothing was better than turning her over, sliding a taut g-string to the side and fucking her like that, the spandex band rubbing against his cock as he went in and out of her in ecstasy. Even the pain of it, the rawness caused by friction against the fabric, held a kind of eroticism. Days later, rubbing vaseline on his dry and rashed cock, he would become aroused by the stinging sensation and rub one out like that, wincing at the pain as he orgasmed.

There was a piece she wore once in a while that was exclusively spandex: a web of inch-wide black bands covering her entire body like she was tangled in some type of trap. That piece got him going. He had a picture of her wearing it on his phone. When he traveled for work he would masturbate to it. This piece, the one she was wearing at this moment, was nice of course, but the other one was the best.

He was not sure if she’d brought the spandex web piece along with her for the trip. So far it had been all new pieces she had picked up for the special occasion––using his card, of course. He had been promoted. And so he hired her out for the weekend and brought her to Mexico City, where they had been doing not much more than fucking and drinking. She probably wouldn’t prefer the term “hired out” come to think of it. For one, it was inaccurate. He was the only one of her followers that ever met her in person and fucked her. Everyone else was restricted to purely online. So it wasn’t like she was a woman that could be hired out really. But he couldn’t think of a better term to describe it because he was, you know, paying her.

He pulled his cock out of her now and turned her over. He slapped his hand on her asscheek once, wasn’t satisfied with the sound, then did it again. He slid his cock into her and started fucking fast. She moaned and screamed; they were both drunk and being quite dramatic about the whole thing. He grabbed hold of her hair, bunched it up in his fist and focused on shoving his cock as deep into her as possible.

He had been married before this. Before her. Three years of marriage that just went kaput like everything else did. Which had been its own kind of devastation: the fact that even marriage wasn’t safe from the destructive forces of time. He wasn’t stupid. He knew time eroded all things. But he’d also always heard that marriages, if they were good ones, which he thought his was, would erode to reveal new things so you wouldn’t be too bothered about the whole eroding business. Not him. Not his marriage. His just eroded and then, one morning, before either of them got out of bed they just called it off. Like they were yawning through a simple weekend plan:

‍ ‍I think we should divorce.

‍ ‍Yeah. Well… yeah.

He told her he was about to cum. She instructed him to do so into her mouth. He pulled out of her and she quickly turned around and got to her knees. She spit on her hand and grabbed hold of his cock and stroked it until he orgasmed. It got all over her face. This was the happiest he’d been in five years probably. Maybe six. 

“You know how they say divorce in Spanish?” she said.

“How?”

“Divorcio.”

“I like that.”

“It’s nice, right? Kind of fun and sparky. Divorcio.”

“It feels like a word an American would make up when explaining what happened to a Spanish speaking friend. It feels like something I would have said to you when we first met.”

“I’m sure that’s what happened. I’m sure that’s where it comes from.”

“Just some guy.”

“Si, um, hola. No yeah, my wife no here no mas. We have divorcio.”

“Mucho bad divorcio. My wife no like me nada. We no habla.”

“Hablamos.”

“Right. Hablamos. We no hablamos because we divorcio.”

They were sitting in Parque Mexico eating ice cream. They had spent the morning strolling Roma Norte. He had bought her an expensive necklace which she, out of some previously unseen principal, had initially refused. But he had talked her down. Convinced her to conceptualize it as an expression of friendship and not an expression of love, which, truthfully, it was, which both of them knew it was. But now she wore it proudly around her neck, which looked a little odd because she was wearing running shorts and a t-shirt and it was a somewhat large, ornate thing that would only probably look best if she was done up a bit more and in a dress. He knew she didn’t love him, but he also knew she enjoyed the attention of someone that was in love with her. And he didn’t mind having the rug pulled out from under him. So he would go about loving her on this trip and when it ended and she inevitably told him she didn’t love or couldn’t love him or was not in a place to love him, he would just take it on the chin. He would go back to New York, start up at his new position, and have this little moment to think of when things got difficult and arduous. He would have his little fling in Mexico. His little moment of love or whatever you wanted to call it.

“It’s getting hot,” she said.

“It’s Mexico. It’s always been hot.”

“Fuck off.”

“Let’s go to the pool.”

That evening, at a pulque bar off of Insurgentes, they befriended two lesbians named Laura and Phoebe. They were also from New York but clearly it was a different New York than he was from. There were many New Yorks, as everyone knew, within New York. The one that he came from could be replicated basically anywhere. You could pull his piece of New York out and put it in Phoenix or Seoul and no one would notice. The one Laura and Phoebe were from was also not that unique or interesting, though in their minds it was because it was in Brooklyn and they were gay and they were originally from the midwest. The only person who came from an interesting New York was her, and that was because she was born in the Dominican Republic and then moved to Washington Heights when she was young and so both the place she was from and the place she ended up in were unique and interesting and would be difficult to replicate elsewhere.

Laura said, “This is the second time we’ve been here. Last time we only stayed around the Roma area. But this time we want to get out a little more. To the other neighborhoods.”

“We went to Coyoacan yesterday,” Phoebe said. “To the market and to the Frida House. But even that was like super white.”

She said, “Do you guys speak Spanish?”

“I do a little,” Phoebe said. “I took it in college but I’m rusty. I’m getting better the longer I’m here though.”

“You should go to Tepito,” he said. “I hear people still get robbed there.”

“Or go south,” she said. “Wild dogs killed four people in Iztapalapa last year.”

“That could be nice,” he said. “You guys might like that. Wild dogs, eh? Sounds pretty good, right?”

“I know how it sounds,” Phoebe said. “I just, I don’t know, aren’t you curious at what’s authentic and what’s not here?”

“What is this shit?” he said, gesturing to his mug of pulque. “I mean what even is this shit?”

“It’s an agave distillate,” she said.

“Okay?”

“It’s like, when they cook and smash up the agave hearts to make mezcal it makes a juice that you ferment, right? Typically you run that through a still a couple times to turn it into mezcal. This is just the stuff you get if you don’t do that part.”

“It tastes like cum,” he said.

“It’s just a strange texture. It’s an important drink here. They’ve been drinking it for a long time. Don’t call it cum.”

“I didn’t call it cum. I said it tasted like cum.”

“You don’t even know what cum tastes like.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes I do.”

“For example,” Laura said, unprompted, “when we went to Thailand a few months ago we ended up making friends with these guys that were actually from there. And they took us to this, like, secret beach they knew about that you had to trek through the woods to get to. Or even when we were in Austin these guys took us to this after party metal show at someone’s house. You know, stuff like that. We’re always looking to get into stuff like that.”

“Do you think,” he said, “in those two cases, those guys understood you were both gay?”

“I mean,” Laura said.

“Because you know what it sounds like?”

“What,” Laura said.

“You know what it sounds like. I don’t have to say it.”

“Say it,” Phoebe said.

“They were trying to fuck you.”

“You don’t think we read as gay?” Laura said.

“Maybe in New York,” she now said. “But probably not here. I’ve never been to Thailand to be fair.”

He nodded. “Maybe in New York,” he repeated.

Everyone sipped their pulque. It was a nice night as most nights there were. The days in Mexico City had an overbearing feeling to them. Something about the sun and how it felt midday. And it wasn’t the heat he was thinking about. It was something else. It felt like you were being watched by the sun. Like it was looking at you and judging. Other places in the world, the sun was watching you from afar and sometimes not at all. But in Mexico it had a front row seat. And it was staring at you with interest. But the night ended all that. The night was a release from the judgement.

“How do you guys know each other?” Laura now asked. “I mean how did you guys meet?”

“I used to pay her to send me naked pictures and videos through an app on my phone,” he said. “And then one day I actually just ran into her on the street. On East 58th of all places. And somehow I had the balls to ask her to have a drink with me. I got a divorce somewhere in there as well. There was very minimal overlap.”

Phoebe and Laura didn’t say anything. They looked to her for confirmation.

“It’s true,” she said. “Though I wouldn’t have said it like that.”

In San Pablo de Tepetlapa the four walked about looking for something to fill their afternoon with. They had spent the morning at the Diego Rivera Anahuacalli Museum. The number of sculptures and pieces had been baffling. How did one man obtain all that? Surely he must have just been the only person in the market. What incredible foresight he had to collect all those little Aztec and Mayan figurines. And the building itself. How does one even come up with such a thing? And how were people still allowed to walk around it? In the United States it would have been closed off to the public years ago, deemed too large a liability to have people walking around such a cavernous and sharply edged building, not to mention the cultural risk of having so many rare artifacts on display to the public, who always mess things like that up. At least in America they did.

They stopped off at a little drug store and bought bottled water and mangos. They ate these seated on a nearby stoop, him peeling and cutting up the fruit with a little plastic knife and distributing to the rest of the party. He tossed the skin on the ground in front of the stoop which caught the eyes of two older women walking by. He got up, grabbed the peels, and went looking for a trashcan.

In a nearby alleyway, where three men were seated on milk crates and smoking, he found a trash can and tossed the peels into it. Taped to its side was a flyer. It said: Hombre de Burro – El Vidente. There was an arrow at the bottom of the flyer pointing to the right of the can. He followed this to a door where the same flyer was posted, this one with additional information: $20. He stood there thinking.

Soon the door opened and a young man, perhaps sixteen, stood before him. “¿Quieres ver?” he said. He held out his hand, “Veinte.”

He put his hands in front of him, as if to say, Oh no, just looking. “Lo siento,” he said.

The young man smiled and shook his head. “Esta bien. Uhhh, Quince?” He cleared his throat. “Five-teen?” He held out his hand again.

“Quince?” he asked. “Fifteen?”

The young man nodded.

“To see donkey man?”

“Si, Hombre de Burro. Muy famoso.”

He pulled out his wallet and found a twenty peso bill and handed it over. “No cambio. Gracias.”

The young man nodded and stuffed the bill into this pocket. “Gracias, gracias.” He turned and began walking down a hallway. He followed.

They arrived at a door. The young man put his ear to it for a moment then knocked. A voice came from the other side. “Entre.” The young man nodded, opened the door, and stood to the side. “Por favor,” he said. “Entre.”

He entered the room and soon the door shut behind him. It was dark and the only light was coming through a nearby window that was boarded up with wooden slats. There was nothing in the dusty room besides a small plastic folding table with two chairs. In one chair sat Hombre de Burro. He said, “Siéntate por favor. Please sit.”

He stood by the doorway for a moment longer, taking everything in. Hombre de Burro, from the looks of it, was a slightly pudgy shirtless man with some kind of donkey mask on his head. He sat at his table with a deck of cards that he continued to shuffle.

“Please,” Hombre de Burro said. “Come over here. Come sit.”

He did as he was told.

When he sat down he got a better view of the mask. From what he could tell it was a real taxidermied donkey head that had been hollowed out to fit around a human head. There were two eye holes to see through, but it was too dark to be able to see his eyes. Around the base of the head, at the man’s neck, were the scars of what used to be stitching. The donkey head had been sewn on, seemingly a long time ago.

“Is that… is the head attached to your skin?” he asked.

“Yes,” Hombre de Burro said.

He nodded.

“When I was young I was in a very bad car accident,” Hombre de Burro said. “This is the story. My whole family was t-boned at an intersection near the university. My whole family, my father, my mother, and my sister, were killed instantly. But not me. Though I should have been. I recall the feeling of being trapped in the mangled car. There was sharp metal touching each of my body parts. I could feel blood flowing from all over and I could smell gas. My face received the worst of it. The roof above me had collapsed and a jagged piece of metal had been driven down through the middle of my face. When people arrived to begin helping, and as they attempted to save me from the wreckage, they realized that I had become wedged in that fashion. That it was not possible to remove me from the vehicle without first removing the entire roof of the car and taking the metal shard out of my face. Otherwise the metal would mutilate me. They tried to move me about but with each maneuver I cried out in pain.

“There was not enough time, though. That was the thing. Everyone was scared that the car would soon set on fire so there was no time to be delicate. So they did what they had to. A fireman, I still remember the look of him and his hairy arms, yanked me from the car and half of my face was torn off. I can recall the feeling of peeling. Of feeling my face peel off of my head. I can still hear it. I can remember the sound of it. Of the peeling.

“I nearly died from this. I lost a lot of blood. I do not understand how I survived. Even many of the doctors had taken me for dead. But, somehow, I made it.

“Of course it was not without its consequences. For the rest of my life I would be marked with a disturbing disfigurement. There was only so much the doctors could do and this was many years ago at a hospital that was not so good. Perhaps nowadays I would have fared better. But this isn’t the point. The disfigurement was terrible and remains terrible. It is one that is simply repulsive for the people to see. People will do their best to accept disfigured people into their lives, as you know, but mine is simply too difficult to look at. So, when I felt healthy enough, I left the city and went to the country. My plan was to kill myself. I had stolen a bottle of sleeping pills from a pharmacy and intended to kill myself in the countryside near Puebla. I was thirteen years old.”

“But you didn’t,” he said.

“I didn’t. No. Though I did try. If I had been left alone I would have done it. It was the interference of others that prevented my death. Someone saved me. I had taken the pills, laid down, closed my eyes, and went off to sleep. But I woke up. I woke up in someone’s home. I had been saved. They had reversed the effects of the pills using an injection.”

“Who?”

“Exactly. Who? I don’t know. When I woke up, no one was there. I was left in a home with no one. I waited for two days, eating the food that had been left for me, but no one ever came to the house. The only sign that someone had been there was, of course, that I was alive, and second, the mask, this mask, had been left out on the table for me. There was a note. “Para tu rostro,” is all it said. “For your face.”

“And so you sewed it on?”

“That happened much later. I would wear it for years before I decided to make my body one with the mask. But what happened when I put the mask on is important. Suddenly I could see differently. Different from how I had seen in the past. As I walked about that house in it, I became aware of the presence of the future and the past as well. They began to exist for me in the same fashion as the present. I could see the past and the present just as material and real as I could see the here and now. The home, once vacant, was now buzzing with people and activity. Everything that had ever been in that home and would ever come to that home, I could see.”

“And you can see my future and past as well?”

“Of course.”

He nodded.

“It is imperfect. I will tell you that much. What I am capable of seeing are the versions of you that decide to walk through the doors and sit here. There are many versions that do, I have counted twenty different ones, but there are many more who do not. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“Well, the ones that did not enter, they don’t exist right?”

“Of course they exist. I just told you they exist.”

“But I decided to walk through the door. So the possibility of me not walking through the door no longer remains, correct?”

“Not correct. The possibility of you not walking through the door remains real even if you decided against it. It is real because you thought about it and considered it. The thought made it real. And so now the possibilities are out in the world. They do not go away. Do you understand this? You can walk out of here and think of what might have happened had you not walked through these doors, and just like that the ghost of the other choice comes back to you. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“So then if that’s the case, why bother telling fortunes? If I might just walk out this door and slide back into the path I was on previously?”

“Are you not curious? You are not curious of the paths I can see? You paid twenty pesos to come in here and tell me not to tell you about the paths?”

“Of course I am. I just… Of course I’m curious.”

“Of the twenty paths I see in this room there are three that seem most prominent. There are three that are shining brightest to me.”

“What are they?”

“Answer this question for me: when you love someone, do you find yourself able to put your full heart into it? Do you find yourself able to abandon your preconceived notions of how your life should be and adjust to what you have been given, or do you feel you must keep hold of the life you have been imagining for yourself.”

“It’s difficult to say.”

“Of course it is.”

“Well there have been times in the past I have given myself up to people like that.”

“And what happened?”

“They ended.”

“I see. Here’s what I’ll tell you: of the three most prominent paths I see, only one of them appears to have taken the love of another fully into his heart. The other two have remained most in love with themselves. I will also say this: only one path seems to be happy more often than he is sad.”

“Fuck.”

“Those are not bad numbers actually. Typically people come in here and have no chance at that sort of thing. You at least have a shot.”

“Which one is the happy one?”

“The one with the love. Obviously.”

“Can you prove that you’re not just making this shit up as you go?”

“I am, in a way, making this shit up as I go. That’s what I do.”

“Well can you prove that you’re actually fortune telling and not just spitballing some wacky shit?”

“Your mother’s name is Carrol. Your father died when you were eight. His name was Gabe. You had a divorce three years ago and have not dealt with it well. You have gained a good deal of weight. Perhaps around forty pounds.”

“Okay enough.”

“You understand it is risky to let someone into your heart in the way I am suggesting. So you typically don’t do it.”

“I said enough. I believe you.”

Hombre de Burro stopped for a moment and looked over to the covered window. He nodded.

“What are you seeing?” he asked.

“Your death.”

“Christ, nevermind.”

“You will die old, most likely. There are few versions of you that encounter enough daily risk for something bad like that to happen. You will more than likely live a quiet and simple life and die old. Cancer more than likely.”

“What kind?”

“Prostate. The same as your father. But not until you are old.”

“Incredible.”

“There is risk of suicide as well. A very prominent risk.”

“I won’t kill myself.”

“You don’t know. You never know.”

“I realize that.”

“Is there anything else you’re curious about?”

He thought for a moment. “No,” he said. “That about sums it up for me.”

“Do your best not to think too much of the paths that lay before you. Trust me. Just try to act natural.”

“Right.”

“Have a nice day. Return whenever you’d like.”

“Gracias.”

“Of course.”

That night he and her sat up late in the courtyard of their hotel drinking beer. They shared a couch and she lay with her legs dangling off the end and her head propped up against his lap. They would return to New York the following day and he was beginning to dread it. He didn’t know what she felt.

“I don’t want to go back,” he said. “We could stay.”

“And do what? How would we live?”

“We would drain our bank accounts on cocaine and good times first.”

“Of course.”

“And then we would be forced to figure it out.”

“Foolproof.”

The two sat in silence for some time. He had not told her about Hombre de Burro. He explained his absence by saying that he had an upset stomach and had to find a bathroom. He was not sure why he lied to everyone. He was not sure why he did anything, other than it was what felt correct to do in the moment that he was doing it. But there was so much he did that did not feel correct in the moment but which he understood to be necessary to his wellbeing, and, in most cases, was. If he compared the things he did between what felt right and what did not feel right but was necessary, he assumed the chart would read 80/20 in favor of the latter. And this made him sad in some way he couldn’t quite articulate.

“My father died of prostate cancer when I was twelve,” he said.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I’m not sure. I just thought you should know. It seemed significant.”

“Oh.”

“I just thought you should know.”

∩

Jake Hargrove is from North Carolina and lives in New York. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Cult Magazine. All his writing can be found at ceramic-horses.com.

Five Poems

CERTAIN SILENCE,

pristine freshness of or in
it’s all the great murder at
the snide edge with
him. Muddy us ground
into mud. Dust
in my mouth.
Gestational cage
after illness.
Position akin to
mirror-image king’s.
Stern clouds
standing, sagging,

9. THE MADE DART
DARKNESS
IT’S LESS POISON
THE BAD
TYPE OF PLACEBO
IS THAT REMNANT.

EACH CREAK

crop’s teeth, color white.
The beginning of a burst of
companion mass flow. Pantone moon. Let’s begin
treatise on worst of
the eating, low-burrowing
line. Hand held up mastic. Maximum
brilliance, the moment. A form
of live burial – leave empty
be grabbed, evince the
commotion.

TWO OTHER

hawkers, nobody. Young served
above and with the extinction halfway
done. Peopling was drowning, and mouth.
Held down was not dancing a head. The
dogs, too close, excited, at most accident.
In a sheepskin arm and wrapped around another.
Haven’t tried pinching death. Not yet a name
which suits admirably. Elizabeth long-dead
full the crockery for the vegetation. Twenty-odd
years of evidence. Poor-self lye. Poor-me soot.
Poor-body ash. Pushed stuck, standing tree of hope.
Six in every thousand.

BEECH

Hazel Hornbeam Ash
Sycamore Sweet Cherry
Black Alder big teeth sucking
on air. Simple radar of
cheek and the hand so
long hills instead. What and
why are always coming off,
lit like the military blanket.

10. THINK THERE
SOCIOPOLITICAL
BATTLE ALL AS
HAVEN’T NATURE’S
NOTHING
THE CLUE
WHICH THE BACK
LET’S DARWIN MAYBE
THE FULL-SCALE
ESTABLISHMENT.

11. THE BE OF I
HUMAN ACTUALLY
YES EXTENDED
OH SAY
THE OBSESSION
OF NEEDED
OF PRODUCTIVE TIME
PHYSICAL
MYSTERIOUS
INHERITANCE
QUIET BEHAVIORAL
SAYS IS IN SERIES.

12. BETWEEN AND
SING AMONG SONGS’
CORPSE SEXTANTS
GO PREVIOUS
MAY THE FOUND
LIKE SCIENTIFIC
OPPOSITION.

13. WILL TO UP
OF STANDARD,
WELL LISTEN IN
WILL BATHE
DETERMINISM
ASSEMBLY OF THE
DIFFERENCES
EACH HUMAN SKETCHBOOKS
NEITHER BROUGHT
NOR THE STATES’ NOTEBOOKS’
MONOPOLY SKETCHES
DISTORTING HANDS
OF AND FOR AN OWN,
I’LL ENDS OUT
DIGRESSION.

14. HANDS KEEP
I BUT WAIT
TO SHOW WITH
MY INTEREST
ALL THIS COMPING
THE ALSO SEVERAL
ME WE HIS’
REFERENCES DESTROY
THE TIME
WILL NEW OF AND
ATTEMPTS ARE VIABLE
AS ALSO DIATHESIS
TO THAT KNIGHT
ARE THE SUFFICIENT
OF THEMSELVES,
THE OK.

15. SHOW BROAD TO
KNOWN STRESSOR
COME
THE IT ARRAY
FACTS TO GATHER
I BOTH ALSO TYPECAST
ON THOSE ASKING
RECONCILED IF APPEASEMENT
SHE’S AT MELLOW
LANDMARK-LIKE
ORGANIZED MAYBE
ALREADY CLOSE UP
MEDIATING ANTE
UNIQUE WELL
BETWEEN ARE
WORLD-CLASS
ALL BORING.

∩

Milo Christie is an artist, poet, and curator. He co-directs Weatherproof, an artist-run space in Chicago, IL. His work has been published by Antiphony, Capgras, Secret Restaurant Press, and Sore Journal.

Three Poems

The pretty paintings hang
On the white walls of the
Classical art museum. When
The patrons look at them
They feel different feelings.
The warm blood bathes
Their smart brains, making
Their feelings warm and good.
The good paintings warm their
Cool brains with warm thoughts.
Warmly the man laughs at the
World. Worldly the woman
Laughs at her smart thoughts.
The pretty paintings laugh
At the cool feelings classically.

The beautiful, clean animal sleeps
Beautifully in the pleasant garden.
The ugly, sick animal dies
Beautifully in the pleasant garden.
The pleasant garden grows more
Beautiful in the clean air and sun.
The beautiful moon pleasantly pleases
The clean animal sleeping.
The green grass cleans the sick
Animal dying beautifully in the
Sunny garden. The dead air sickens
The clean animal pleasantly sleeping.
The dying moon cleans the sleeping sun.
The green garden pleases beautifully
In the pleasant green garden.

In the online store the perfect man
Happily visits. In the shopping cart
The perfect woman gladly adds the item.
The happy item makes the man perfect.
The glad item makes the woman happy.
The item enters and leaves the cart with
Grace. The quantity increases and decreases
With perfection. The tasteful button
Authorizes the happy payment. The
Perfect man enjoys the fun experience.
Happily the glad woman is perfected.

∩

Lawrence Giffin is the author of several books, including Untitled, 2004; White Future; and Christian Name. He is an editor at Golias Books and lives in New York City.

One Poem

Autobiography

I wanted to write a poem about my life
So I took a walk down to the canal
With a friend to talk and listen to music
Before a reading, it was humid, early August
Dark clouds in the sky, a sort of oblique
Foreshadowing, she handed me a menthol
And read me a poem she had written
Hunter - I tell you / one thinks - one does it -
As if anticipating my question
About autobiography and its inability
To transcend the local, interior time
Being the form our inner experiences take
I explained that I’d found it indulgent
To write about my life like that
But was now bumping up against the inevitable
Barrier that is the edited experience
Of one’s life, the way we replicate it
The fragmentation inherent in that
We talked for awhile about what it might mean for me
To write my life, in contrasts that animate the latent
Intent in the poem, she suggested a framework
Which I took to mean as a methodology
For grounding the self, the discursive contours
By which the notion of self, the past, is actualized
A way of navigating the dense singularity
That surrounds work and living
The world we live in, its exigencies
I told her I’ve found it painful all my life
To hold the past up to the present
Like a mind comprehending light through stained glass
The way the light is filtered
Through systems of meaning, broken ontologies
To write about my life
To buckle beneath the weight of what that could mean
To touch the flame of potentiality manifest
In a certain brightness
Quilting the music over every moment
I guess I’m mostly just afraid of what might happen
If I let myself be vulnerable enough
Within the right framework
Listening to the world recalibrate
Beneath the glowing embers of what art is
In the gone currency of memory
Utopia or a future uncancelled
Expelled in the conscious gestures that mark a turn
The performance of living
The performance of the poem
It’s phrasal, I mean, life is
Like how could I actually write a poem approximating life
This consistent digital hail clipping the brain
Like how could I accurately render the social
Private instances of syncopated levity
The phenomenon of music
A necessary intimacy in that
Bodies etched into time by their needing food, sleep
And the lyric, as a tool of the state
As a kind of access point into the nostalgic
The violent associations that come with that
Does the lyric get to work as a vehicle for transcendence?
The uneven amplification of the voice, the void
The work of autobiography
In the work of art
The compulsive work of memory, narcotized, incidental
I want to understand the uses of that
And the cruelty of art, or as Fred Moten puts it
“the cold, funerary / origin of the work / of art.”
I come to the poem draped in the bright curtain of instability
Locking the past into place
Along the ridges where reality is vague enough
To tap the moment back into a kind of ceaseless present
A moment that I hand to you
In a gesture that precedes my doubt
My past lit by a lie
And the night streaked with what?
That’s my flower there in the liminal
Blue flower crushed in the street like a vision
A fixed perspective, clotting and dense
My heart becomes an arrow
Held static in the high beams of sunlight
Dragging me back through what I understood
As a kind of personal reckoning
Broken into form
The past divided up into seasons
Glittering, fungible
And from the bank of the canal we watched the clouds
Advance like an insurgent dyad
Overtaking the ambient hum of the music
And this, I realized, is the framework
To assimilate one’s experiences
Into something tangible enough
To lean up against the outer life
To walk back the sharp radius of a dead feeling
In the abstraction of memory
To come closer to the impulse
Becoming what the birds are
Contours in the symmetry of a day
To write the body back through
The extended gradient of a gone feeling
To push one’s self up against the warped
Surface of clarity, to stand outside
In the rain, draped in all that circumstance
While the world evaporates
On a distant axis that is the localized
Space between a memory
And the event itself, to rewrite
One’s life in the service of others
To provide a space for figuring, refiguring
The aesthetic experience of rendering the self
Within the framework of the poem
A kind of beauty in rearticulation
A scaffolding upon which
Someone might drape their own experiences
Bright circumstantial phenomena
Entering through the I, I disclose everything

∩

Hunter Larson is a poet from the midwest currently living in western Massachusetts. He is the author of the chapbooks American Mystic (b l u s h / Illicit zines, 2026), Desire Lines (Press Brake, 2025) and was the winner of the Poetry Project’s 2023 Lisa Brannan Prize. He co-edits the poetry journal and critical archive Little Mirror.

One Story

Invisible Theater

It was a lonely time, when I moved down to New York. I was living out of my email then, frantic to fill any hour not already devoted to scraping together rent. Sometimes I saw my friends, but for the most part they were busy with their own lives. Other nights I tried to meet people, tried to go on dates or take part in reading groups, but with little luck.

            So instead I walked. I would take the train into Manhattan and walk down the Hudson and then back up again, my face burning and my legs numb, until it was time to eat or leaf through the used book tables or return to my apartment, alone. My roommates thought me desperately lonely, and I’m sure they were right.

            One of these nights, I was heading back to West 4th Street when I stopped before a small storefront in which a crowd had gathered. That winter was frighteningly cold, with news full of homeless men freezing to death on subway grates, and it would be accurate to say that I was drawn by the warmth. Only after I had opened the fogged-over door did I notice just how large the crowd actually was: every seat and spare bit of floor had been taken, as had the spots along the walls and the alcoves before the windows, and as I stepped in upon a blast of frigid air, every one of these resentful faces seemed to turn towards me. I forced the door shut against the draft, sidestepped to the windows, and tried my best to pretend that I belonged.

            Up front were seated three men, framed on either side by hanging mobiles of children’s toys and broken glass. So fierce was their debate that they had not even registered my entrance. Though a few terms come back to me—invisible theater, productive alienation—I cannot piece together their conversation. Every word seemed couched in scare quotes, and I found myself lost in the jargon. I do remember the audience’s near-total focus as it fixated upon these three men, pausing only to applaud or to scoff.

            I was able to make out several camps: one very large, in support of the youngest of the three men, who spoke decisively and dressed like a bike messenger; another, much smaller and composed mostly of young women, possibly students of the professorially balding man in the middle; and a nearly nonexistent third, which offered anemic support to the man on the left, whose crumpled and old-fashioned suit seemed to fit his speech, delivered haltingly and with a strong East European accent. The leftmost man would occasionally rouse as if about to deliver some decisive point, but the words never quite came. I felt an instinctive sympathy for this hesitant old man, so plainly out of time that he might have been a piece of art, displayed fondly but nostalgically to emphasize the gallery’s history. I longed to see him take hold of his voice, for his words to flow as if carried along by a vigorous and subterranean current, to burst out and overwhelm the room like one of those rivers lost for league after league amongst caverns and caves before it emerges at last to travel its final triumphant miles into the sea. I don’t believe he finished even a single sentence.

            At home that evening, I searched for the gallery in which the event had been held, and discovered that I had inadvertently attended a discussion on “The Future of Revolutionary Drama.” It had been held to celebrate the youngest of the three men, who had just debuted an avant-garde piece of Epic Communist Acid Poetry, and had been hosted by a visiting NYU fellow whose most famous book, Post Lapsarian, Pre Revolution, covered “the possibility of Marxist organization among the Manitoban Mennonites.” If the talk was filmed, I have never found the video.

            The old man’s name was Gyula F, and he seemed to have been invited largely as a courtesy to the gallery’s owner. The two men had belonged in their student days to a thriving circle of artists in Budapest, a group of poets, playwrights, and painters who had pushed up against the constrictions of socialist realism in their drive for truly revolutionary forms. In their defining moment, the circle had put forth a manifesto in the heat of the revolt of 1956, demanding freedom for the people of their country. “The revolution demands that we be able to live our lives as free socialist subjects,” they declared, and were punished horribly for it.

            The Soviets took Budapest and smashed the circle, scattering its members into various prisons and labor camps throughout the country. Some, including the playwright’s wife, had managed to flee the tanks, and after several hard years in prison Gyula F joined them in New York City. It seems he had been an influential and even quite popular voice in the émigré scene of the 1960s and 70s, penning in his native language a number of plays which were translated with the support of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. But as the memory of his ordeal faded, so too had his status in the theater scene, and it seems the cold warriors dropped him entirely. By the time I first learned of him, Gyula F was regarded largely as a revisionist, a crank whose works had fallen out of print and were never performed.

            A month or two later, I was leafing through an East Village book store when I came upon a play titled Nights of Judgment and Days of Decision, by the very same Gyula F. I decamped to a nearby coffee shop and read the entire play.

Nights of Judgment was written in Gyula’s American exile. It takes place over three acts, each of which covers a different day within the Radio Budapest building during the revolution. Featuring many characters, its effect is polyphonic, voicing all manner of opinions, beliefs, hopes, and sorrows within its conceit of a fictional radio program, with one man at the center: Sándor, an idealistic student who is the first to storm the stage and the last to be silenced by the curtain.

            Act one begins on October 23, when Sándor and his compatriots seize the microphones and bellow their demands at the audience: democracy; liberty; true socialism. They debate the proper ways by which these ends might be achieved, how Hungary can chart its own way in the world, and their own, more personal connections to these questions. Béla wants to write novels without censorship; Magda delivers a soliloquy on the suffering of the peasants; the teenaged Csilla just wants to cast a single vote.

            Act two takes place at some point in the intervening days, when rumors of invasion run rampant throughout the capitol and the revolution feels more tenuous than ever. The revolutionaries have become jumpy, anxious. Their conversations are taken up with gossip, fear, and petty complaints: about the weather, the air inside the station, even the temperature of the coffee. Everything, it seems, but the revolution itself.

            Sándor says very little during the second act, perhaps saving his words for the third. It is the early hours of November 4, with the Soviet tanks already rolling through the streets and the revolution nearly at its end. But all anyone in the station can do is bicker. They return to the petty grievances of the second act, spread gossip and rumors about the state of things on the streets. Will the Americans intervene? Will the UN? Everything is confused, nothing coheres. But then Sándor races onto the stage, “[a streak of blood and dust across his forehead],” and, with the revolutionary Prime Minister’s statement in hand, he wrenches the play in another direction. Where until now everything has been bewildering, undecided, Sándor sets it all to rights: the Soviets are here, the revolution is over. “But!” he thunders into the microphone: “We are at the mere beginning of our struggle!” What is history, he asks, but a vast panorama of defeats? And according to the laws of the world, so much defeat must lead, inevitably, eventually, to victory. The great powers of the world, drunk on their triumphs, cannot imagine a world other than the one which they have inherited. “But we the defeated, we the victims of history, know that our hopes oh so rarely line up with reality.” This, he announces, is the secret gift given only to the conquered: to realize that the world is never good enough, that it can always be otherwise. “We will bear their victory, we will suffer under their heel, but we will never be cursed with their complacency. And when the tanks come again, we will mine the streets and blow up the bridges, and only once it is too late will they recognize that we who are first the victims of history must end our lives its masters!” And with this pronouncement soldiers storm out from the wings, the curtain drops, and the theater goes dark. The script calls for no bows. “Our applause will come,” the author notes, “when the revolution triumphs at last.”

            I read this play again the next day, and many more times throughout that winter. I see today that the play’s political content must have escaped me entirely. I was so caught up in my own life at the time that I instead found consolation in this victory in defeat. Any failure can be managed, I realized, but only if given its proper place in the long arc of similar such failures. Misfortune muddles on for an eternity, but history points us to the emergency exit. Even the worst loss must eventually lead to victory. It’s embarrassing, I know, but, throughout those long, cold months, I subsisted on the shame.

            No matter how many bookstores I trawled, I never came upon another play, and the online listings were beyond what I could afford. I loitered around many more events, some at the gallery, others held by associated groups, all in the hope that I might run into the old man again. But either he was not invited or the reading had been a fluke, or perhaps something much worse—regardless, I never saw Gyula F again.

            I kept going, though, long after I should have given up hope. That July, in the middle of a heatwave that melted the blacktop overnight, I went to a party at a loft in Dumbo, to celebrate the launch of a Maoist quarterly. The white-shirted socialists sold marked up beer and mushy ice cream, and their debut issue was full of articles on maternal communism and the radical leveling power of Soundcloud rap. The AC was broken and everyone was sweating through their shirts, and they gave me suspicious looks every time I went to fill my water bottle in the hall.

            The night began with a Q&A during which one of the editors suggested the reclassification of mental illness as class warfare, followed by a dance party, though everyone felt too oppressed by the heat to move. Perhaps seizing their moment, a group of people paused the music and strode to the center of the room. At their head was the Acid Poet, still in his bike messenger outfit, who announced their purpose: as the great comrade Gyula F had recently passed, they wanted to take a moment to read from his greatest work. I was taken aback. The old man? Dead? But before my shock could come to a rest, the troupe launched into act three of Nights of Judgment. They hit all the same beats, faithfully reading out Magda’s panic, Béla’s doubt, and Csilla’s descent into cynicism. But there was something off in their reading, a certain stilted hesitation, as if afraid of the lines. They flubbed the names, made no attempt to correctly pronounce any of the Hungarian interpolations. I could have provided a better recitation from memory. Their amateurishness began to irritate me. Hadn’t they practiced, hadn’t they prepared? I wanted to stand up and demand some respect for our dead prophet.

            Only once Sándor entered the scene did I notice that the people around me were laughing. The Poet walked out with his chest puffed and his dark hair slicked back into a sparse pompadour, and delivered this monologue which had come to represent so many of my hopes over those lonely months—but as farce. He snickered through the proclamations, exhorting his comrades through a leadenly ironic veil. He deflated the stakes, and rendered their tragedy a joke. It was as if the man could not imagine the possibility of failure, let alone defeat. I could not even hear the final line for the howling around me. “For our lost comrade,” announced the Poet with a sneer. “That he may find victory in another life.”

            I fled the party in disgust, and in shame. The air was boiling even in the middle of the night. Women sat by the mouth of the subway to catch the crossbreeze. I tried to wait for the train, but, my mind on fire, I left the tunnel and began to walk. I was humiliated. How could I ever have been comforted by something so absurd as victory in defeat? I realized, all at once, that I had been leaning on a column that was not even there.

            I walked up from the river, past the Brooklyn Bridge inlet and towards the parks near borough hall. There were young people about, a homeless man collecting bottles, an old woman with her dog. My hope and my shame nearly boiled over, but who could I have told? The party, the poet, the old man: what were these things to anyone? What even were they to me?

            I stopped before the war memorial, the statues looming in the globelight with their cloaks and laurels. “May their sacrifice inspire future generations and lead to universal peace,” I read upon the wall, and never before or since have I felt so ridiculous.

~

Over the following years, all of the bookshops of my first days in the city would close, and many of those from the party would twice pour themselves into a failed presidential campaign; the Acid Poet would be hired by an Ivy League university and quickly fired for sexual misconduct; it would come out that the magazine had been funded with the proceeds of a shale gas fortune, and one of the editors would be arrested near a dam in Oregon with a bomb in his trunk.

            And, combing through the dead writer’s papers, a researcher would come upon a post-script for Nights of Judgment and Days of Decision, likely written towards the end of Gyula F’s life. The stage is bare but for a scuffed wooden chair, from which Sándor addresses the audience. Many years have passed, and his life in Hungary has grown ever more despondent. He holds up his scarred hands, spreads broken fingers and counts down his sorrows. He has been exiled to a remote corner of the country, where he tends a decrepit plot on the collective farm. His friends are gone: some dead from the revolution, many others—Béla and Magda among them—disappeared into the West. No one will publish his work, and he rarely writes anymore.

            He pauses a beat, and then picks up a refrain on these themes. “We continue to struggle—but for what? Even if a new world were possible, what would it be without ideals? Without friends, without words? Defeat is like a smashed mirror, in which we no longer see the least bit of ourselves. No, there is no victory for the defeated. What is lost,” Sándor concludes, “is lost forever,” and then he rises, and exits the stage.

            In the margins, Gyula F had scrawled one final piece of direction. The stage is to be left as it is. There will be no curtain, no house lights, no music to mark the end. The audience can wait as long as it likes. Sooner or later, he writes, someone among them will see that it is time to leave.

∩

Robert Rubsam lives in Brooklyn, NY. He writes fiction and nonfiction.

One Poem

Portrait of a Lake

sch edules take over i
h some thing i
ear he ar a bl
ink some on has asked
for or a bout over email s
i b o
ut a # of cha
llenges em erge

we lo ok + lo what
ok for ever
a man |enjoys s la
ng ke view
lo oks from us to us
a h l ies —
eron f by

a side walk is w e
est en ll p
ding + gol fers are back
to fuck everything up to g
weird looks + be ive
too friend
ly
i sling a m
way i’ in
the lake
some hour —

a pp pect ma ybe
l ex whole
ness or whatever i’m assu ming
h o discuss nous
wever i name things
w/ diat oms + decide to be
unhealthy

contrarians generally app
for cont’
d fore reciated
bearance kindnes i,
s wim
or whoever — go for a s
engendering a politics of swimming
wh s
ich i ay no to, to
be ethical

measure d re
sponse
measured response ti
s the bo ck
xes
ful fills expectations ach eives
fundi ng goals t o
save my precious creatures
in the muck

producing this play s out
ren dering st ream bo
o tto s
pr ducing m
stre am bottoms or
la ke bottoms we can
wallow in wh
ich is utopia

for the a rage walker
ve may be possibilities
are remote + the lake
fence a em broils
pparatus nings
them in mea
compelling them to not
may
be this is paranoid

slug is m y inter
t ind locutor
+ o her my critters maybe
i express ambivalence i ex ss
anxiety y they i pre
reply some ing i w ll not say what
th th
ey take over me
th ey take over
me over what

lat er we (owl + i) si
t quiet ly to a
gether which is series of
things, it enacts t hin gs
our achie
vement is nothing @
all

why this why t ha t
the wind get s in w e
a ha ve a l oo or yes
k of w ry bu t als o o
f joy if things cd get this way
they can get another w ay
+ then we refuse to describe
a lake

no d ab le pattern a colossal
iscern fuck-u p
we commiserate — w t t
e commiserate abt i we alk
in hushed tones ab t is or t t
t h ha
it comes down to this it com es
down to th is
it comes down to this

a swarm of insects h m e
’ as
+ i m talk ing to some tep id
do g walk ers ab t th e we
ather they can’t be lie it
t ve
the swarm insis s on something
they really insist on it
i say no we are a collective

an example o f a l a
ke dis mu
gruntled tilated
wh ich can sti ll be enjoyed
he ry
i + maybe others t for hours
to unde rstand a lake what
does it want what does it have to say?

∩

Austin Miles is from southeast Ohio. He has poems published in Moss Trill, Eulogy, Ballast, and elsewhere.

from Correspondence

TATTER BALLAD
TAM LIN B

your tongue 

   .        .           .           .           .           .

                          double rose,
    rose but only

                                kill

10/18

and then of course the fact of death
rears its scary finger
in the workplace
at the end
of the email, before the rose and after
she writes I
appreciate
your help with this. My failing has been hastening
and it may be as soon as April
and I (which is she)
would not wish to leave
the photographs and chapters
in David’s hands—he would not understand
Please forgive me
for being so frank. first of all
she writes just a personal
FYI: there was a stroke three weeks ago
and I am having trouble
filling out your forms and responding
to all your questioners. I have no idea
what you want me to do
with those two empty
Excel files. There are no permissions
or captions needed.

Those are not good photographs. ☐

1/12

in reply he writes I
have told Maria repeatedly
that, while we are working
together, we are “the author”
and ought agree
before presenting a unified front
to the Press’s representatives, i.e.
Yes, it is her life,
but it is our book! This is not the place
for her full
autobiography, memoir,
or CV.

even though this cutting was painful,
I did it and suggest the Sacred Paw
writings be deleted from the Bibliography… Plainly,
it is not
the Press’s responsibility
to make up for her lack
of publishing and publicizing
and do what
she should’ve done years ago
and it’s a fact that our contract
is for a book about blues
fieldwork and research
and she is using this subterfuge
to insert her personal
stories far off the mark
of what the book we signed off on
was meant to be about. I shall leave it
up to you to be the arbiter
regarding these deletions

and regret that we have had to put you in this difficult position.

THE TWA SISTERS

   father

   dragged
And stripped her

                father                                  
        made a harp o her    

12/26 

she writes in the absence
of consensus, what is in fact
the best future

for the book. That reminds me
an old friend died just hours ago
after at least a week
of terrible suffering in a cold
ICU and I refuse
to spend these last couple months of my life
“arguing” with you (who
is he, not we) to present
a “unified front” to these people who will be
publishing our notes. We both know
there are points our opinions will never

correspond on. It’s been that way
since way back then, back when we were in
the field. Not all our readers

spent time in poor Black homes
in the 60s. The descriptions
have pointers so people
look deeper. Almost everyone
just looks
at the person holding the instrument.
Even you.
You could have taken two steps back
and gotten Jack
Owen’s extremely intriguing boots
and work clothing in your photo
but you were totally focused

on the man and his guitar. ☐

DIVES AND LAZARUS

    Bestow upon the poor

hunger

 art
   lies

         hunger

art
lies

10/25

My job as the assistant is
to write I want to ensure you
the Press’s director has forewarned 
the designer to retain 
your photos such that they remain
high-quality documents and will not
become mere accoutrement to the body
of the text. Thank you for your message
and David writes in privacy She’s simply unwilling
to take my advice
based on a lifetime of writing and publishing.
All I can say is good 
luck working with her.
For you (who’s I) seem very 
diplomatic, and I think it very well
may all work out in the end.

Well, good luck with this.
You may need it! and she writes

We lived in Spanish Harlem.
Back then, 110 was cobbled
with a fountain at the end.

The mounted police and the men
with bitstrung horses would water 
their animals there. There was the rag
and bone man and the produce
man hawking and wagons full
of coal to be shoveled I don’t know
where and when you are inside
those interior brick buildings

you can’t hear the city. It’s like living

in the grand
canyon as the sun comes up
over the rim. I was appalled to see all 
the stoops were gone. You walk and you walk and you walk

and though I miss it I could not live it, as I am. ☐

1/14

I thought I sent you this New Biography, but here
it is again. I suspect it will end up being
whatever David wants. A fall
on the ice; David writes
this book has gone beyond
its original purpose, evidently in an effort
for Maria to have “equal time”
I’ll write no more. She writes We (she and Rick)
would’ve been without a phone
except for us old-fashioned folk
who have old-fashioned phones
When the snowstorm caused my neighbor’s tree
to fall on me
I plugged it in

but the tree is just

menacing and undestructive
yet. his intention is to diminish

my presence in the book—yesterday, another stroke
long beyond that moment
she photographed David
writing in the foreground, behind him
an exceptionally beautiful example of wall decor
Note women’s 
purses in the leftmost corner. Aside, she writes
[I used David
only to have a reason
to photograph the wall.] I wish that people 
would look into the photos
rather than at them. Tobaccos I have Grown
and Loved. A Simpler’s Garland: the Gentle
Art of Poulticing, forthcoming from Sacred Paw,

I won’t finish them in time. Please leave out the titles. ☐

4/17

She writes me Even 
worse than losing the music 
in my hands has been the loss
of my voice. I want to write to Maria Seems
for so long you’ve gone unheard the gods 
knocking under the surface
of objects, bodies, on the topic
of delusion - joy 

[Quoted text hidden]

Tradition needs time to wear a song
down to its essence. This assistant listens
to her typing Seems to me
a literary hand
played a role in these songs’ devising. Very precise.
Very accurate. Sorry… I apologize
for that ‘David’ stuff 
I accidentally slipped in
to our private correspondence. bits 
of lyrics—a series
of verses, loosely arranged 
around an emotional core. Soon our community 
will be nothing but tourist shops—death by 

online commerce. ☐

THE CARNAL AND THE CRANE

   argument
             Carnal

Was     the mother of
                   the                    Ghost

1/26

later she writes me I
am confident this letter
will go through deliciously
I write her
contradictory logic and she responds who knows
with the coming and going of texts
where that scrap originated. so strangely
attractive to me (and she) to share
my emotional landscape—sprawling tree
of unpleasantness that is the indo-
european worldview. It was hard

to think and speak
because I could feel
things were not right to reckon
I type with death By the way
I loved your writing
about the proposal songs. There is still 
a lot she writes I 
(echoing myself)

would like to respond to in your letters. but I can’t touch those waters

∩

Jackson Watson is a writer and translator from Georgia. They live in Providence now, where they work as a wildlife rehabilitator and serve as a poetry reader for Nat. Brut Magazine and Tyger Quarterly. Their work is published or forthcoming in mercury firs, Fence, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. @iamthedogiam

Four Poems

∩

Thom Eichelberger-Young is up in Buffalo these days. They’re running Blue Bag Press and hawking two books out recently, including ANTIKYTHERA (Antiphony, 2024) and OINTMENT WEATHER (Cloak, 2025). You can find their writing forthcoming in FENCE, Cleveland Review of Books, Capgras, and Ritual Dagger. 

Three Poems

Eyes Pouring, Washing Cheek

I dreamed I ate a white sapote. Isn’t water funny
Specialists gather from across the world
To observe a stalk of rice
A cattle egret keeps me company
While I plant daikon. Deeply indigo
You should’ve seen me
When I tried to siphon water from the duck pond
In moonlight the gallerist and I
For exaggerated effect
I take off my sunglasses the moment the sun emerges
From the clouds. It’s hard to say what you know
If you don’t know where you’re going
Any road will take you there. Hey what do you know
If you don’t know what you’re doing
Anything will do
I’m just sitting here while the guavas drop
Why slog through it all? Why not travel like light

Wake Up and Smell the Malabar Chestnut

There’s a full moon
Behind the clouds. The horses
Come right up to me
I really thought the sun
Wouldn’t come up this morning
She’s 100 years old
And still meeting new people
September is a field
Did you know the banana tree
Is actually an herb
Here we go
Back to the world of mirrors
I’d like a break from my ego
Water blossom
On your pant leg
You said you were lonely too
What if consciousness
Is just matter in an electronic state
The myth of original thought
The unimaginable
Is around every corner. I thought
About the shape of your jaw
Cinema is a circular word
The perfect leaf
The archetype of leaf
There’s space in this
Togetherness. The rain stops
When you step through the door

In a Beautiful Place Feeling Sad

When I wake up it’s already been a good day
Everything else is just gravy
It doesn’t hurt to touch a cactus at night
I don’t need anything from anybody
Now, let us talk about growing vegetables
I just wrote the word “zucchini”
For the first time
All of my friends are benefits
Time moves slow here but my mind
The sky is expansive and there’s very little noise
It’s hard to maintain a sense of reality
I am very lonely and my life is lacking in intimacy
I think Oprah just drove by
I think Oprah and I just exchanged a look

∩

Emmett Lewis lives in Queens, NY. His work has recently appeared in Chicago Review, Capgras, Volt, Noir Sauna, Nat. Brut, Tagvverk, Mercury Firs, and elsewhere.

One Poem

Grisaille

You can hold something once
the way a match holds fire
and spend your life
as the hand after

The thing you can’t have becomes
The thing you can’t have
The thing

The ache arranges itself
like furniture in a dark room 

The divine thing gleaming
just there
just 

*

The saint’s hand passed once through your life
and you have been unclean with holiness ever since

You wanted heaven for one moment
You had it
You had her hand on your chest

You will not speak it
You will make a fist of it instead

She could put her throat in your mouth
and you would go so carefully still
you would make a religion of not closing your teeth

*

A man is a door that closes from both sides
a man is the cigarette he doesn’t smoke
to avoid another small decision

A man is the love he sees coming toward him
and steps aside for, as if it were meant for someone else

*

Is it your fate to do the honest work
of swallowing yourself
over and over like a stone?

The ballad goes: a man loved a woman
but the man was made of fog and old roads

The ballad goes: a man can love and walk away from it
because the walking is older than the love

*

You went back
—To what? To yourself?
To the shape a man makes
when he dissolves
into only the outline of endurance?

And now what
—Will you say that you’re fine
in a voice the size of a grave?

*

There is a fox who lives in the old tale
where the brave things happen
In the story he is fleet, he is wild with purpose
he crosses the distance between the forest and the light

In the actual room
you sit with your hands folded
The fox moves somewhere under your ribs
pacing, pacing, pacing

Now you work
You wake and work and the days are a straight line
But to lose something
is to claim you ever held it

The mind makes monuments of moments
then refuses them
How the divine burns when you touch it
how you return to earth with your mouth full of it

The ballad goes: nothing useful
just fog and roads, the usual

A fox, or the idea of fox
or what fox means when you mean something else
you can not-say, not-say, not-say

∩

M. Elizabeth Scott is based in Glasgow.

Four Poems

from A Season

⬥

How hard it was then
As an already speechless person
To see the lilies open   
With friendliness out of the shaking earth.

As the hummingbird translated from open to open
Is falsely loved, feared and sought, is the rare thing itself
To find the fading line of its knowing

Who enters it and how
That semi-light coupling in space grows bigger

So all the while that slow fury inside you asks
In the burn of blown snow where the heart lives
What tongue describes it what chicken’s
Survival does it fear and seek.

In open-book
Apocalypse lost in the light and dangerous
A low roar            In which your whole body turns

Seeing nowhere else, in which the walker
Does not too curiously observe particulars,
Swinging from leaf to leaf
Into ugliness redeeming freedom.

And in that instant abstraction is killed
In the same dark as its creature or in
The most disagreeable kind of snare I never
Before allowed the grotesqueness of,

Writing promise into space and space
Into ribbons, into curtain calls stabbing the air.

⬥

We all have our states of fullness
Being splashed with mud and getting wet with water
And all-too-engrossing to permit of any other

Occasional faint wash of music no music
Ankle-deep in the hiss of private ghosts—

As when the half-dream comes
As if to hear us sing again
From zero to space to absolute
Encirclement

No distinctness no pointedness
In ruthless impossible life as we were meant
To climb inside
Life being born swelling nausea swelling life—

Just so there is in what we love
Also a time for wanting
So badly right then
What it was in the eye of the scream

With every inane
Word a little nearer
To discriminant sweetness
Going slowly playing dumb

Out into the dark and
Pensive embroidery
But aware of the sun and spring         
Of one glance back made scarce

As a kind of wind,
Of a hand that moves
To see itself blown out across
As in the old days, in waking, and now,

Across some various difference
Into the light that the I pours in.

⬥

Is that what this is? The personality
Of everything perceiving, perceived.
The affective
Correlate of the welcome smell of grass

With which all the houses are filled.
Being at once “dead” and alive in empty space.
The whole truth
Of milk and raw honey, the pressed face

Of the sun when the air is filled with mist.
As when like horses
Or a low flying plane the minutes roar past
In answering reflections

And at a distance above the level of the snow you see
Like the sheen of a moving snake the glint-
Ing contours of the mountains, a still music,
An opening

Out of existence welled into future’s            flowered past—
Just so with the other shades preserving
The most interesting and beautiful facts
With educated eyes you go

On a path where no conscious nature comes into its own,
As a wrinkled, corpsey thinness, a diamond
Reflecting everything, a tongueless
Self-performance waking

Married in a sharp high wind.

⬥

But it is hard to remember
It is not so simple as that
In electric wetness your your my my

Pushing against the wall it was too soon
For the former body
Needing to breathe again much needing flesh

As sonorous as the peeling air
Which loves but will not listen
Which translates the mark of the scar
Without ever understanding what was good

In health or in sickness on the basis now
Of swarming space better muscled better dreamed—

Or else having itself begun to unzip
Into the same dark fragment as
While moving some kiss of warped light

Yielding to weird
Silence about to vomit the sun begins
To see the one thing not yet eaten, a pearl

Plucked from far in the past
Where there was clover growing
A deep shadow
A smile entrained on the border between

This day, yesterday, the dawn
Between structure and sewn story based on I
And this nothing, a sea
Inside me like in no suspended

Thirst the story is
From end to end a natural home

A life-dream crossed with blood
And extra light

To which I’d give myself
In this indirect way
Stretched out in the dark and aware of it
This necessary

Split of flower and fruit
Of summer and strange spring.

∩

Michael Joseph Walsh is the author of A Season (University of Georgia Press, 2026), winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize, and Innocence (CSU Poetry Center, 2022), winner of the Lighthouse Poetry Series. He is the editor of APARTMENT Poetry, and his poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Guernica, Fence, jubilat, and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia.

Three Poems

Facts

Hello from the ghostly box. 
It’s hot here. 
There are actions, objects, names. 
For example, Bronc Heiner.
Haze Hunt. Cash Sweat. Draxton Miles. 
These are all men 
who competed in a recent
Utah high school rodeo.
One of them tied goats. 
He was good.
The goats stayed bound.
That’s what you want.
To operate symbolically.
To be conscripted into the service of 
cultural norms.
To find nothing odd.
There is nothing odd.
We are tying goats.
We are named Ruck Anderson.

Facts

I’m in the porn of the world 
until completion.
Porn with its little o 
corrupted from the drawing of an eye.
Everyone said
pictures first and the plot
frozen. Then what

a flat medium this is for life
like painting in breath
I capture the sigh perfectly.
I am told

some people are less
some people are dead
or create corpses
like beetles fucking
on a raspberry bush
eat the leaf
under them skeletal.

And if the earth reboots:
Normal. Let’s dunk
on the state, which has
poisoned my ovaries.
They are full of cysts.
When I hope, they laugh.
I love laughing!
Just a little drizzle.

Facts

It’s been a long line 
in this wrong life
but I’m in it for love
and information
By now I can recite 
the poem you already know
A totally accidental fall 
from a Russian window
By now I make you stink with me
playing around in the viscera
of what I read last night 
about how individuals
individually 
lost their homes 
down a hole
Coffee has dripped in the hole
Ground beef, onions: down the hole
Apples, eras: hello hole
The hole wants what it wants!

∩

Rennie Ament is the author of Full-Time Mammal, selected by Brenda Shaughnessy as the winner of the 2025 Iowa Poetry Prize and forthcoming from University of Iowa Press in Spring 2026, as well as Mechanical Bull, an Editor’s Choice selection published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2023. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Bennington Review, Cleveland Review of Books, Poetry Daily, Denver Quarterly, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Owls Head, Maine.

In the Dark Light of Currency: Everyone Reviewing Each Other’s Books

Kelly Clare, Demonstration Forest, Community Mausoleum, April 2025, 37 Pages
Maxwell Gontarek, Study for Swimming Hole, Community Mausoleum, July 2025, 68 Pages
Eric Wallgren, Icewalker & Dirtworm, Community Mausoleum, October 2024, 27 Pages
Jon Conley, Deadheading, Community Mausoleum, September 2025, 60 Pages
Hilary Plum, Important Groups, Community Mausoleum, January 2025, 46 Pages

Community Mausoleum has been publishing books for a little over a year now, and in the mode of self-eval, taking stock, or otherwise memorializing that publication activity, I thought it might be cool to have the press’s current authors all review each other’s books. I thought it would be especially cool to have them do it one big pile, each of them writing separately with minimal parameters, and then I’d assemble whatever came in in whatever form could be made to make sense on a page of HTML and Cascading Style Sheet.

I reached out, not that long ago, not expecting much, ready for this idea to fail, and then they just did it, quickly and generously and well. To my surprise, I was surprised by this. Not because of the quality of their attention and writing and the time they took for each other, but because the book review, which I’ve spent a lot of time around and think a lot about and know to be an excitingly limitless form as well as this puzzling kind of currency in certain contexts, can seem so heavy and fraught at times—the stakes feel high, in the dark light of currency, with criticism another exposure of one’s self after all, and in the runoff market of ideas and jobs and hustles and rushes to publish one can worry what gaunt-looking professional cloud hangs over the whole practice, or else the sour scent of a suspicious social economy. Which doesn’t really make sense, because there’s no evidence of those stakes being very actual. No one gets promoted or buys a book because of a review. You can make friends, but no one reads reviews. No one reads books. No one reads anything. Right? What are we doing here.

These reviews weren’t written for money or bylines. Who’s going to read them? They were written for each other and for you. They are reminders and evidence not only of what’s possible and maybe even hopeful still in the deep gears of our micro-cultural discourse jalopy, if we want that, but specifically that the work of book reviewing, especially in a small press context—down here, buddy!—is not a professional activity. It’s something we do for each other. It doesn’t have to be exceedingly hard or formal or serious. You can just write some cool thoughts about a book you liked and have a good time with it. Which, if I may be permitted to cast a single publishing wish down the rotten well of this new year, I’d like to see a whole lot more of: Everyone reviewing each other’s books. It’s not going to get us paid. It doesn’t matter anyway. It matters a lot more than that.

ZP

..

Kelly Clare, Author of Demonstration Forest

On Study for Swimming Hole by Maxwell Gontarek

These are such humid poems. Muggy water that presses in, goes up your nose. Poems full of mold’s density and mulchy promise. While inside Maxwell Gontarek’s Study for Swimming Hole, I feel like I’m hovering one inch away from the filmy reflection, always.

I have thrown myself into many swimming holes over the years, found the muck afterwards trying not just to adhere, but to press in. “This is how music works too,” Gontarek writes, “The scurry under the nails / our residual / green shell would ease / into clear fold if we could hear it / The cream under the carpet / and in our ears / small moving hairs.” In the muddy ear, distance is impossible. 

The illusion of distance, the invention of linear perspective, is the lowest point in art history. A professor of mine decades ago wouldn’t drop this belief. There’s nothing real in a replicated palazzo made of receding lines. It’s just rows of smaller and smaller trees. As in Study for Swimming Hole, linear perspective isn’t possible when you’re in the world, stepping on the world, shoving the world into your face, throwing your limbs deeper into it. The world is crammed. Arm’s length “nature poetry,” like those Bierstadt western landscape paintings where our perspective hovers higher than any human view, pushes us away from the “nature is metal” Annie Dillard-ness of it all. “Right now” is too itchy and too close.

But what of the depiction of the real thing? How can we see it? While reading Study for Swimming Hole, I kept underlining every moment with the word “real,” starting with “Rotting in a curt whorl/Realism inverted is use.” An inversion involves placing something upside-down or inside out. It is not necessarily a negation. Realism inverted, like a tarot card, becomes action in “use.” To grasp, to handle, to rot as matter turning over, to become nonhuman microbiotic usefulness. Press in and hold on. 

Capital “R” Realism in art is a term coined in the 1840s. Realism discards pageantry and wealth and instead embraces frankness and grit and labor. Realism is direct. If you’re really conducting “a study,” the observed world is brash and confusing and makes, as Gontarek writes, “impossible any “outside.”” The density in Study for Swimming Hole, where “the tropic of reality lags / its tide of eyes” and “the landscape can open with impunity / and allow a body to pass through,” is Realism. As Gontarek pulls from a varied collage of sources, we break the surface of found language and found world. We breathe in the distortion of a haze, a reflection in water, fog hung with mineral vapor. 

“The object is encrusted in the object,” he writes. Yes, I agree. Doubled, and with a penumbra. 

..

Maxwell Gontarek, Author of Study for Swimming Hole

On Demonstration Forest by Kelly Clare

1.   Tried drawing a diagram to explain a feeling about this book. To draw a 3-D square you draw 2 squares and map the corners of one onto the other. To draw a 3-D triangle, ditto but with 2 triangles. This book is like a 3-D object that begins with a square (“the book”) and a triangle (“this book”). It maps 3 corners of the square onto the triangle, but there’s one corner that’s left floating, somewhere dimensionless. By mapping a square (i.e., “the book,” and all its expected functions, and all the desires you bring to bear on those expected functions) onto a triangle, you get this feeling, reading, that those functions and desires are going haywire, should go haywire, and that when a corner, or stake, of “the book” is dispensed with, other stakes become possible. “This triangle is not a field of study” because the “field” in this weird third-D allows space for lines––of poetry, inquiry, latitude, longitude––to be written which could not be written in “the book.” “The wires exit the house. / The wires exit the house some more.”

2.    Haywire as ethernet.

3.    It follows that no book should be the same shape as any other.

4.    Revisited Hito Steyerl’s “How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File.” Especially the calibration targets in the desert.

5.    Demonstration > Installation.

6.    How literal-sounding notation accrues nonliteral-sounding meaning but then that meaning becomes literal again.

7.    How “the moldy screen / goes both ways” and how this book links forest networks and computer networks, woods and word-processors, bites and bytes, blurring LAN.

On Important Groups by Hilary Plum

1.    In Tomatoes + Why Doesn’t the Far Left Read Literature?, Nathalie Quintane writes that we need more “living books” today, or books which “include in the text the entire hors-texte, which it opens out onto and which makes its outline legible.” If any book in recent memory includes in its text the entire hors-texte, it’s Important Groups, which opens out onto what seems like the entirety of recent memory, making its outline more legible than is normally possible in the middle of all the devastations and mollifications doled out by the status quo.

2.    How a long poem can have a linear-feeling thrust/lilt but one that keeps doubling back on itself, concentrically. How this renders the way lives are not points on a line “forward” (a line constantly amputated by neoliberalism, neocolonialism, etc.) but really more like little momentous centers undulating in waves of overlaps.

3.    The line as jut.

4.    How a voice can be one voice and feel dialogical. How it’s not surprised. Quintane: “The fact that people are taken in by a language that stages itself as a spectacle to itself … is perhaps one of the signs that those who read still expect no more from a revolt or political rupture than a spectacle, and not a liberation. If they really wanted to be more free, they would expect books in other languages, not necessarily more inventive ones, but at least more ambivalent ones.” Ambivalence here not meaning “on the fence,” but like an actually liberatory poetics that’s informed by juts, that doesn’t couch itself in a poetics of liberating you, the reader.

5.    Scalar shifts like “you can hear this inhuman vibration / it’s just on YouTube.”

6.    Revisited Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s “A Clear Presence” and thought about this formal thing shared by poetry and essays, a kind of hither-and-thither-ing between a clear (evident/direct) presence and a clear (transparent/ambient) presence. How they both make visible something about their material which it is orthodoxy’s purpose to keep invisible.

On Deadheading by Jon Conley

1.    There is the entire history of the world in the unsubstantiated etymological kinship of “privatized / & ivied.”

2.    There is the entire history of the world in the dissonant a sound in the line “resembling, reassembling.”

3.    Lyn Hejinian, writing about the tendency of words to attract themselves to other words, writes: “It is relevant that the exchanges are incompletely reciprocal.”

4.    How the phonemes in the opening poem, “(forest),” form a kind of electrical-treeing of rhyme/hum, where “name” attracts “strange,” “away” attracts “layers,” “canker” attracts “cherry,” and a line like “Lo river low / Glade & grove” stretches its vowel drone through a parallel pattern of processual l, r, and v sounds.

5.    Unlawful glissando.

6.    How English can be made to not feel like English in the mouth, as in “To oyamel fir,” “their unworn / who,” “lime glade film,” “least bittern,” “Lust selenic pink faun,” and “soak ellipt.”

7.    What is place, what is ink, what is plaque.

8.    Imagined some language philosopher repeating the line “The river is rather” over and over, uncontrollably, and then trying to put their fist in their mouth to stop it.

9.    The line “The river is rather” lead me to a Wikipedia page on hydronyms, where a section marked “insufficiently detailed” lead me to believe that the word “river” came from the word “rather.”

10.  Or maybe it was the other way around.

On Icewalker & Dirtworm by Eric Wallgren

1.    Heurtebise leading Orphée through the mirror water. Red rubber gloves and “bees in a hive of glass.”

2.    Mandelstam taking an axe to the reflection of the stars in a trough of frozen water and “the magnetic pull / that Icewalker follows, / dissipating / into freckles: different stars / dotted across the sky / and the different icewalkers / that follow them.”

3.    How we used to share one spherical body, with 4 legs, 4 arms, and 2 heads. “A mess of confusion / that pulls feather / after feather / every direction outward / and then untangles into / a sharper, / clearer tunnel.”

4.    Your cosmogony is growing over my fence, so I’m allowed to cut it down. Your cosmogony is double-parked, blocking traffic. Your cosmogony is too loud. Your cosmogony is leaking.

5.    Interior ethnopoetics.

6.    Heriberto Yépez: “Ethnopoetics as: a strategy to leave behind ‘ethnopoetics’ as a curious branch (60’s related) of literature and make it inseparable from poetics, until the term is useless for being so obvious and fancy.”

7.    Space-wolf, Mr. Cogito, and noone.

8.    “The wasted future / curls its finger / in a ‘come here’ motion. Not shackled / nor enlivened by possibility, / but shackled and enlivened / in an entirely new way––in fire, / in obliteration, / a burning / both focused and entropic / that crackles into small pieces / which hold / precariously together.” A book about how to hold together the category of “precariously.”

..

Eric Wallgren, Author of Icewalker & Dirtworm

On Important Groups by Hilary Plum

It should come as no big revelation to anyone who’s been paying attention at any point in the last, I don’t know, 250 years, that the U.S. is and always has been largely uncommitted to actualizing its own mythology as the world’s foremost purveyor of liberty and individual freedom. But it sure seems committed to the mythology nonetheless.

One of the many and more infuriating ways that people try and ignore this discrepancy is to get selective about who does and doesn’t count when assessing whose life and individual freedom ought to be recognized. In some cases, the ignorance is pathological. In many others, it arises from circumstance, convenience—particularly in times of war, crisis, and disaster.

Enter Important Groups. This chapbook-length poem rips open that dynamic through the prism of the current genocide in Gaza, also weaving in disparate pieces of the American psyche like events such as 9/11 and the Kent State shooting, as well as media like Titanic and Law & Order. Because when bombs are falling, when the ship is sinking, when the National Guard has been called, whose humanity is recognized as precious? Whose death is recognized as a tragedy? And what is the function of these distinctions for the systems of power that choose to put forth these questions?

Reading this had me delving into these questions, and then at some point I was also inspired to watch Titanic for what I think was the first time since you had to watch the last half hour on a second VHS tape.

                                    before 9/11
the audience often got reassured
that history was meaningful
because it had led to us

The American condition of feeling safe because you’re the protagonist in the last hours before disaster. To feel worthy and alive, like the king of the world, before there aren’t enough lifeboats for the lower classes. Before the dresser doesn’t have enough room for you.

The task of living through this or any historical moment is to resist any narrative that seeks to create harmony out of violence, both structural and physical, out of genocide, oppression, breathtaking inhumanity. These narratives exist to serve the powerful and not the masses, not you or me. And so what I appreciate about this chapbook is how it seeks out the antinarrative in these atrocities, examines the disharmony.

who will sort so-called
combatants from civilians       dismembered
beneath the rubble

To truly believe in our own shared humanity, it is necessary to mourn all of the dismembered bodies which will be found and remain unfound beneath the rubble.

On Demonstration Forest by Kelly Clare

Near the demonstration forest, you may observe something that resembles organic growth and the conditions under which life can flourish, but don’t be fooled. Step inside to see the wiring.

In this construct that Kelly Clare has devised, technology is a site for growth, as in: a personal computer might get sprayed with a garden hose (“Like so what, motherboard”) and then on the very next page we’re presented with the image of a moldy screen. This thing is filled with such lines where nature reclaims the mechanical (“fluorescent signal receptors, pollen pouring from the modem.”), but then also where the technological spawns new forms of nature “Every computer spits out woods like it. / Poplar and pine split down into bytes.”

Of course, the first thing anyone is bound to notice when they look at this chapbook is how it quite literally reshapes the technology of written verse itself, with the book in the shape of a triangle; and lines running wildly in all directions across the page, like vines scaling a brick wall. It’s something that mimics chaotic outgrowth, but is likely to have been carefully composed.

The shape and form of this poem also works to remind you of the physical vessel which contains it each time flip or rotate the page in order to catch the next line. It exists within a construct, a controlled setting built to contain free-roaming thoughts and direct their flow.

I don’t think AI is ever mentioned once in the text, but in 2026 it obviously comes to mind when engaging with a work like this, which presents “demonstrations” as these digital imitations of life and expression, where perspective is culled from data rather than experience. “I came from the lands of fields of opportunity / Wherein a digital tractor demonstrates belaboring.” And for all the doomsday hype about AI apocalypses and robot takeovers, I wouldn’t hold your breath that this technology will ever do anything so exciting. No, the scariest thing about AI is just how boring it wants to make everything. The dorks have decided that the most urgent project of our present day is to alleviate people of their own imaginations. “The future is sitting in a mold.”

On Study for Swimming Hole by Maxwell Gontarek

In the late 19th century, German mathematician Georg Cantor set forth the argument that there are two different levels of infinity. The first is the one we most often think of, made up of “natural” numbers (i.e. 1, 2, 3, etc.) counted ad nauseum into oblivion. The other, less often considered, is the one made up of “real” numbers (the numbers represented by decimals) which can exist in infinite combinations and lengths between 0 and 1, and by extension exist infinitely between any “natural” numbers.

Study for Swimming Hole is a book with an eye towards both of these infinities. It gazes beyond the furthest event horizons of our perceptions. And it also tries to break perceptions apart into as many little pieces as it can. Here images and ideas and pieces of text will swirl and combine, and then just as soon crash against one another to burst open.

And this is where you will find life in these poems: in the gaps, in the debris they leave behind.

Another departure brought to consciousness
            with its irregular framework
            and its immaterial dome of calms

In the center the dawn of all
At the loss of its curve

Alternating in color
            in the content of displacement
            without a theme

Throughout the psychedelic mess presented by these pages, a shape is formed in its empty spaces. Momentum is built from its misdirection, its many frictions. “The content of displacement,” as if this is the speech and these are the words that language itself has displaced. Reading this book, I found so many pockets in which to get lost, to lose myself in, so many words that made me go grab a dictionary.

Until now, I’ve never really considered that there’s likely an etymological similarity between the words “collage” and “collision.” A disparate wreck of pictures, fueled by motion, loaded with reactions. The composite is less important than the interplay and the energy that it generates. I feel like I could read this book over and over and continue to discover newer, more granular infinities. I could keep finding newer and even smaller moments in which to catch my breath.

On Deadheading by Jon Conley

This is a book of death and rebirth. It’s a book where plants and insects in both natural and manicured environments come alive in its dead pages through the sheer kinesis of verse. Many of these poems are built from plain observations, arranged into music and rhythms that recreate the energy of their settings.

American pokeweed berries

Droop to insect suck

Pollinators weigh bulbs

Around & round pods

Dried of black honey

Locust, locust leaves

Sapling, many trodden

Trod, return, receive

Slipping in and out of rhyme, empty space; moving between locales where wildlife can flourish relatively untouched, like the forest, to where it grows in the cracks of human constructs, like the courtyard or the cemetery. These poems sit, they wait, and most of all they’re present in their surroundings, open to experiences both meditative and philosophical.

At the center of this book, flowers die and their titular dead heads fall to nourish a new generation. “Those who plop in the topsoil of the pot / To alone wither in their basin, such is / Their natal-bound nature.”

By the end, in a pair of sky poems, this decidedly earthbound work turns to look towards the Celestia. The verse becomes more abstract, more slippery and aloof. It’s as if, with the night sky as the backdrop, the eyes through which we’ve been observing the world, the eyes that have been wide open throughout, are finally beginning to shutter and drift off towards sleep for a new day’s rebirth.

..

Jon Conley, Author of Deadheading

On Icewalker & Dirtworm by Eric Wallgren

January 10, 10:48 AM EST

can i text u my write up right here?

January 10, 10:52 AM EST

ofc Icewalker walks

ofc Icewalker wants to melt the earth

who knew they had this relationship

cocaine—marijuana

movement to combat boredom

movement to stay alive (movement as “away from”)

boredom=death

Ice & Dirt are the repeating pattern

a consideration of spaces through which to move, a study of the media of movement

vehicle as definition

i am cold—after all that dancing

what is up is up, what is down, down

..

Hilary Plum, Author of Important Groups

On Study for Swimming Hole by Maxwell Gontarek

“This is just a really good book of poetry.” Read the rest here.

∩

Kelly Clare is the author of Demonstration Forest. Maxwell Gontarek is the author of Study for Swimming Hole. Eric Wallgren is the author of Icewalker & Dirtworm. Jon Conley is the author of Deadheading. Hilary Plum is the author of Important Groups. Published by Community Mausoleum.

Two Poems

Inner Winter Solstice

Each year, I’m earth-
     bound. I keep falling
into it with my feet.

I’m not sure what
     I keep failing to see
between the long

shadows stretching
     north now that once
required such stone-

work to be believed.
     Unworshipped light,
I guess, moves on.

And what if where it’s
     going, I can’t imagine
that either? Maybe to

some other planet
      full of slimy fuckers
with dinner plates

for eyes? See what
     I mean? I haven’t
got the chops for it.

All my aliens are green.
     What if the best I can
do is a regular spaceship

to go chasing after in,
     only a little bit slower,
falling forever behind?

Until, one day, what?
     Getting to the end
of it, every known

thing in the rearview,
     finally in a position
to think of something

new, only, it’s just
     a sheetrock white
wall, gathering star-

light, which, when
     seen all together,
looks like nothing.

Going Public

“Landslide” is playing,
but just the getting older part.
I assume that’s almost
always true. A law of airwaves,
maybe, specific to coffee shops.
It’s summertimeishness
that brings me out here,
baring hairy thighs too much
in the boring sun, or maybe
it’s my boring reasons
that bore it warmly.
If I understand anything
it’s this, and almost always
without mercy: I’m tired
of selling myself short. 
On these nearly blinding
days, even the concrete
in bloom, I consider
my blending in a boutique
apology rounding out
the literal one I keep uttering
dumbly across counters,
registers, sidewalks, often
wirelessly, with space
doing the heavy lifting,
a thousand gigantic satellites
or more would seem to say.
I’m sorry for seeing it
this way, for however you
see me, auctioned off
by the particulars of angles,
lighting, the position
of my body in this chair.
It would be nice, I think, 
to be among those
so enamored with this idea
that they feel comfortable
wearing an interesting hat
or like they can dance
proudly at weddings
in a way that involves
moving their feet. Sometimes,
I forget my body so much
that when my wife touches
her hand gently to my spine,
a reminder to straighten up,
I wonder if I look like someone
who’s constantly cowering,
slouching into the planet.
I tell people that in another
life I must have been
a meerkat or a prairie dog,
always watching for hawk-
shaped shadows, scurrying
back down into my burrow
to prepare myself to worry
more, to worry better.
Just the other day, I told
our daughter’s pediatrician
that I thought if I wasn’t
worried, then I wasn’t
being a good parent, and she
looked at me for a long time.
I wanted to say my line about
meerkats, a joke back down
into my burrow, but it was
already too late. Soon enough,
another song is on, or
it’s a different place with
different kinds of lights. These,
hanging down from the ceiling,
attached to ornate bronze
chains, unclear if their purpose
is for our seeing, or if they
are here merely to be seen.

∩

Eric Kocher’s chapbook Sky Mall was selected as a winner of the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize. He teaches Environmental Studies at Wofford College, where he also serves as director of the Goodall Environmental Studies Center. His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, A Public Space, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, and Oversound, among others. He lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife and their two children.

Three Poems

Small God Shoes

i.

Gods were good
for utterance over entrails
or bone dice, foul
for the heat of summer,

cupped ears at need,
both mutter and shout—
we are stone and free,
this year of our lord.

Small god shoes
are filled easy by Number,
a dog who beckons well,
without a better offer

of either treat or play.
Happy Number, the true, the
good and, broken, the jolly;
we prophesy on Number, too,

and kill fewer beasts
to learn time. Number
explained this summer heat.
Yes, Number must hear us.

ii.

What he should have been was angry
at the rock. After all, it was a rock
and he was walking through, all legged
with purpose. His fingertips can curve
into dirt less fragile than themselves,
grit can slide between nail and nailbed,

into each wrinkle at the knuckles,
can give him protection against the light
and teach him to declare: here light, there
dark, there dim water—but half-dry mud
will dig through his skin as he climbs
the trailside hill, so that soil at once shields

and destroys him. And he will get above
the rock. But what a simpler world, anger.
So clear and strong in its swing of the sledge.
I only hope he does not forget, having risen
above this rock, that he can still go forward
and drop down again; I myself am buried high

into the clouds, too muddily
enthusiastic to walk, and now
I just toss my delirium about
like cobwebs on the highest branches
of a beech tree. Did I climb a beech,
and did I start from the same root?

Reaching for a trunk, he needs to wrap
his soft arm around the bark. He tumbles—
and did he clear it? I’m too high to see.
This mist is nice, keeping good count
of the birdcalls without the bodily distraction.
Humor me: did he land across the rock?

Did he break across the surface? Or did he
fall by chance beyond it? Did he choose
well, despite the fact that he has hair
and eyes and divots beside his kneecaps?
Someone, please—will he be angry
on the ground, now? Will he swing out clear?

Try to Imagine Celery

A snowman could live
for thirty years, and
start to grow
tired of smelling
carrot with each breath.

A snowman would find
the density of his torso
miraculous. A snowman
would never wonder
why his eyes are black,

only wonder at their
perfect blackness. As
tired of carrot as he
may become, he could not
imagine smelling celery as often.

Instead of the almost-
wounded feeling of a too-
short toenail, he would hate
the new snow he had to pack
beneath his armpit.

There is every chance
that voice, which means
self, is all there is.
Who will summon the density
to tell me celery is impossible?

Wren-Thinking

A wren hopped itself
into view. View me,
it said. I said no.

It hopped again, then
fluttered upward and returned.
I won’t give in.

I can’t be sure of you,
I said, you are either
vision only or a lesser mind.

No, it said, I am the mind
and you are something else.
I split the atom

the day after I fell
from the nest, but I could
not care. You can’t sing

when it would save your life,
just because you cannot prove
the meaning of “to save”—

or of life, for that matter.
No, I said. I have given
all of this to you.

Oh, said the wren. He
fluttered up again, back
down. He cocked his head.

∩

Charlie Ericson’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming at Aeon, JAKE, The Atlantic, Measure, Contemporary Literature, and elsewhere. He teaches at Oberlin College.

Five Poems

*

a rolled terrain cigarette burning
stamping bolls of despair
seeded in mid air
as fireworks’ tentacles
tightened for landing
on a graph ocean

half-sunk ships teeter
like see saws
cut through bottoms of relief

[onions in quartz tunics
ripen in rustled beds]

*

swallows nest in the mud-tonsils
peak hoarse carried along by a wind
eroding mountains
into chess pieces
being plied
simultaneously
to inhabit margins of possible moves
hatching as tuataras
scanning the spectrum with parietal eyes
that flash within infinite mirrored rooms
of a sequin coat
dragging thistles and thorns
scratched by silken surfaces
having engineered goggles
for examining swallows in midbreath

*

a run blurs into a black butterfly
derived by a meadow’s square root
in velvet halos of pollen
sifting through a cloud emerged
from a handshake’s collapse of a building

the potter’s wheel throws
a tornado of imprinted passers-by
on a storefront glass
as rub-on stickers of horror

{another story: tattoos
on jammed wrists of film rolls
measuring pulse rate by flashes
plowing through the skin’s surface}

a breath encircled by
migration trajectories outlining
an onion bulb with cubical parabolas

*

a dragon blows fire-breath chambers
into basalt layers of fig
juggling wasp sparks
fused by lightning injections

the fig tree’s poi jangle
on strung washing lines
dividing highway streams
into blurred red-white strokes
of prehistoric dawn yolk
whisked into tempera

a polyptych of elements
oxidized by hearths
whispering
in fluorescent cracks’ dialects

*

a flame framed in a double glazed window
as an onion bulb of fire
to burn vase scales with a roar

tilted trees of the horizon
printed in a quiver of artefacts
shimmering on canvases
like sharp feline glares

[fencers with green foils
drafting quick sketches of abrasion]

a fire peeling sparkling shells off
incrusting the topology of diamond
with shards of furrows
generated by light crumbs

∩

Ekaterina Derysheva is an interdisciplinary poet, born in 1994 in Melitopol, Ukraine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Poem-a-Day, Lana Turner, Asymptote, Four Way Review, Zerkalo, Tlen Literacki, Literaturportal Bayern, Volga, and Homo Legens, among others. She is the author of Starting Point (2018) and There Will Be No Installation (2023), and co-author of Earth Time (Romania, 2020). She is currently an Artist Protection Fund Fellow in residence at the University of Pennsylvania (2024–2025).

One Poem

and there is a STORM

AND IT’S LIKE
the flavor SUNSHINE is said 
to taste 
like white grape ?????
hot bother rot WATER
kai says would u 
say it tastes
like white grape 
no 
i wouldn’t
say anything tastes like 
white grape 
i don’t know what that 
IS 
even 
i am in the city 
that WORKS
i didn’t know
some people just 
worked HARD
there was a lack of PLAY
sun in the shiny shit
well 
it was fun while it was
FUNDED by chase 
travel
miles and miles i flit
for the sake of eeeeeeeeee
FRIENDS ?????
professional developers
ballet ballad again again again
imagine developée
was what i WROTE auto
matically corrected in the document
automatonically incorrigible in the SOUP
of the airplane’s upper deck
can i move yr bag pls
no BITCH
everyone on the airplane is apple JUICED
my dad is only not angry
for fifty minutes at a TIME she said
tiring way to tire
my dad is only dad 
imminent birthday
i am LYING
on the couch ha
sorry bout it
writhing in a notebook
that is virtual and inchoate
hello 
is that a KEY
i see up your nose 
oh well
better than a flower
yay it’s kai
bringing me a YEAR
bringing me a miso salad 
dressing for my 
WOUND i flew with
wafting whatever
in the midwest wash
i used soap
i am CLEAN
after alllllllllll
yay a door
is adorable my middle 
NAME 
sorry
teehee lots of those
slopping around
in the sauce of the
POEM ugh
not me naming the OBJECT
baby baby obsolescence 
i am getting OLDER
like almost thirty
like almost thrive
maybe tomorrow
let’s try that again
maybe TOMORROW
flirting with normalcy
snorting in a skort
i mean i’ll stand
at a podium WHENEVER
microphonically approbatory
one glass of ROSÉ pls
health springs nocturnal
the pope once came to 
PHILADELPHIA the city
i am absenteeing
i totally drink TEA
in kai’s house which tastes
not so tacitly
of brown RICE
slurp hard mattress imagine
me princess and the peeing
i got up to do that
yay a bathroom
ow my SLEEP
it’s totally apnea
just kidding that’s just
my biggest FEAR
(((((((death ??????????????))))))) ugh
what about a MONSTER
the vibe is like
i’m wearing a t shirt
drinking mojito FLAVORING
la la la
it’s HOT
and the flavor doesn’t go
to your throat 
i explained it’s
all the way in the FRONT
door? key
it’s like
i came here to read about WORK
and i didn’t do my JOB
it’s like i came to
the city that WORKS and 
WPA’d my ass
into some wifi
why fire someone
over lost TIME
pay me for my time OF
whatever oh DAY
thunder bowling in
and we discussed the
DERECHO of 2020
when the bone collector
laughed in his t shirt
and everyone was in IOWA
except the difference was
i never went BACK
it’s my first date
in chicago i am lying
on kai’s couch
commandeering a form
i remembered
ummm
i used to write 
so then i flew 
and what do u think
oh i was going to EXPLAIN
the flavor 
of the seltzer i’m sipping
in the i of 
a STORM
………………………
i’m crashing ?????

∩

Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo lives in Philadelphia, where she curates the reading series Spit Poetry. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks “Boring Eclipse” (The Year, 2026) and “DUH” (Bullshit Lit, 2022), and her work appears or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Joyland, The Offing, Poetry Northwest, and The Cleveland Review of Books, among others. She can be followed @tall.spy on instagram but she can never be caught.

Five Poems

ENCORE

No, I don’t; this is my eye
Blank stake, a green stare

The ocean remains off limits

It’s not doing me any
Good being good
At what I’m doing

Good lord, it was a terrible
Ticking

When the time comes
Know I don’t
I won’t reappear

NOTHING HALETHORPE

live in anything but this
shade that feels like

full sun, don’t, no tint or how
to see it reproduce

its effects on my mood and
interpretation of email suggestions

it’s a dramedy, it’s a satire
so I’ve started crying at my birth

-day, dumb holiday
I forget, eat cold noodles

in the kitchen when you paused
compassion, palm raised

single chocolate, empty card
single candle, lost wick

POEM

A red cat face in spray paint
on the locked-up shed
across the street.

Just ears and a scowl,
three whiskers a side
below a sketch of a pizza.

Capped stupid, scrawled tags,
all in black. Cat fills a small gap,
a red gash across the peeling
white of the door.

Lock and key,
half anger, half
grimace, hunger
and an opportunity.

EASTERN OUTDOOR

But I’m still the assassin,
I’m full classy,
at least gold,
at least sped up, speedy rush
on a herky-jerky public transit ride.

I’m killing,
or maybe dead,
a glamor god glamped down
into perennial party pooper.

I’m riding.
I’m the assassin plus.
I’m so tired from it, thus
I slip myself an allergy pill

to quell my well-earned sleep germs.
So speedy, so shameful. Tonight’s rest’ll
turn me husk, healthier.

∩

Thea Brown is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Loner Forensics (Northwestern University Press 2023). Recent or forthcoming poems can be found in Bennington Review, the tiny, Action, Spectacle, River Styx, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore and teaches creative writing at the George Washington University.