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.

One Poem

(re)vision process (triptych)

∩

Nam Hoang Tran is a multidisciplinary artist living in New Orleans. Recent work appears in RESOURCES, bethh, Indefinite Space, Feral Dove, Action, Spectacle, and like a field, among others. W/ Henry Goldkamp, he co-edits TILT - a journal of intermedia poetics.

Two Poems

ACID FLASHBACK

Kids kicked rocks in potholes
Put everything on red
Lost it in Switzerland

Burnt out in the drive thru
This parking lot was my favorite
And I really love parking

Have to be emphatic
In the haze of destiny
The endgame was plural

Paucity and lapsed focus
The flowers and the flowers
The sunshine in the sunshine

Especially the sunshine at night
Institutionalized weed smoke
Epidemiologically garbage ideas

Drove humvees into the information
Watched the internal telecasts
Drank proverbial bong water

Projected onto walls of hearts
High octane anachronistic
Experiences and life events

Tickets at the meat counter

What the bad feeling meant
When the bad feeling meant
What the bad feeling meant

Grwm while the world ends
Shout out to the true souls
DJ at 5:30 Wednesdays 99.1

You know a small part of me
Never left the movie
And faded into light at the mall

PRECALC

Smoke cigarettes with me tonight
Stand in sunbeams with the gold
Like there will be no sun tomorrow
PS I don’t want to go through life
Handcuffed to some blasted notions
Feeling sad about the old light
Demons shut off after a minute
Screen’s never gonna load bro
Remembering has gotten so bad
I write the memories on my arm now
I’m unsure I can handle window
Please define “business”
I wanna hear that last song
I wanna hear you sing it

∩

Ian Fishman is a poet from Northampton, MA. He’s the author of CALM DOWN! (Factory Hollow Press) and Football Rockstar (illicit zines / blush). Recent writings can be found in Little Mirror and BOMB. He operates a poetry refrigerator named Press Brake.

One Poem

A few notes on a passage from Yasunari Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness

There are many forms of the present
tense. I can say, I am at the baths, on the phone
with my father, and my father knows I am

at the baths. Whereas, I can say, in writing:
I am at the baths, and the reader might suspect
that the present tense is substituting

for the past, especially as the narrative
continues into what happened then: I move
into the hotter water. A church group is here

with us, bathing in their heavy dark blue garments.
Whereas, I can say, in writing: I am born
prematurely, my lungs still a little suspended

in the hot water of my mother, and the reader
knows, without a doubt, that a substitution
has occurred, the present tense serving

as a translation of the past, translation
having occurred in my attempt to make
the past more urgent and continuous.

In writing, I can say, My paperback gets soaked
on one side from magnesium water
and on the other from light rain that falls in short

increments, the cover lamination resisting
saturation until it doesn’t––the rain like a line
repeated aloud, again and again, memorization

occurring, finally, like a death. And it is clear
to the reader that the rain has already fallen.
The book was already more or less ruined,

though I have finished reading it regardless,
on the train. I have already done the work
of comparing the poetic line to the rain.

∩

Jane Huffman’s (she/her) debut poetry collection, Public Abstract, won the 2023 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. She is a doctoral candidate in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver and has an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, and elsewhere. Jane was a 2019 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Author’s note: Thanks to H.E. Fisher for inspiring this poem.

One Essay

There Is Not One Thing in a Thing: Three Things

Shusaku Endo’s The Sea and Poison

To be on the safe side, Kudo attached the envelope to the inside pocket of his jacket with a safety-pin. Every time he moved, the tip of the safety-pin caught his chest. When he dwelt on the fact that the money contained in that envelope had been contributed for his sake by the faithful of this country, he felt a vague sense of pain in his chest.

Shusaku Endo’s writing is an erotics of the nose. His Foreign Studies (1965) bookends Kudo/Tanaka: Kudo, a foreign exchange student in Rouen—post-war—a benefactory of a religious organization; Tanaka, a professor of French literature on a grant, in France, there to research Sade.
        Endo’s writing, largely contemplated, at least formally, for its content—religion, faith, war—east/west stuff—is, to me, a formal marvel. Watch him, up there, clamp his metaphor, about the position Kudo finds himself in, onto its literal double: the money (via its safety-pin clip affixed chest-approximate) causes a catch in the chest; the money, as it is thought about, catches his chest.
        I am immediately reminded about a scene from Claire Denis’ film 35 Shots of Rum (2008) in which Lionel, a train conducteur, sees himself on a horse galloping ahead on the tracks, he is riding the horse that carries him and his beloved daughter. It is a very close image to use, invoking his feelings of protection and conveyance around his daughter, as many shots in this film, in the lay of its reality, are of him driving his daughter on his motorcycle.
Endo tightens his metaphor, or image, like Denis, tight tight onto the nose, it becomes almost, these coincidences, insane.
        In his novel The Sea and Poison (1957)—

Underneath the poplar tree, the old man was still at it with his shovel.

Suguro, a medical student, is conscripted into participating in a series of human vivisections of American POWs, in World War II Japan. From inside the hospital, he at times observes an old man, an “odd jobs man,” digging a hole under a tree and he contemplates the purpose. None is ever apparent.
     A fruitless hole. A burial?
        Suguro’s odd, conscripted job will be the same.
        Endo is obvious, but nothing is, because there is horror everywhere and horror horroring here, now, west, east.
        It’s obvious but is it, because it’s never over, is it?
        I have never met a writer—Endo—so moral and stylish.
        The Sea and Poison cuts in time and narration—it reads like a new wave film—which disorients or excites the reality that you are on the nose, and that every metaphor, or image, is a scene of uncanny—so, so close—return. Reminds me of Isaac Babel—

The orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head—

who described the sky from a war. The image of the sun (severed head, rolling) is a literal double of what is actually going on, on Earth.

Reminds me of Conrad, who wrote Heart of Darkness (1899) within the time of its horrors, during Europe’s “scramble for Africa” (1885-1914). So close. Onto the nose. He spelled it out, wholly, and woolly (remember those two women, sitting out in the waiting room of the Belgian trading company’s offices, knitting interminably, purpose indeterminate, that black wool??). His novel is a description of this trade (genocide) as it was operating as Europe’s subconscious, in those very years of the establishment of that concept, the subconscious (est. 1893), Europe’s colonial incursions and genocides like something you wouldn’t be able to think about, having no reasonable access to it, on a rue.
           Endo, like Conrad, wrote about horror in, basically, real time, and both wrote from the perspectives of their fellow citizens, might as well have been them.

Tanaka, the professor in Foreign Studies who is sort of failing at becoming a meaningful Sadean scholar, visits the rue des Capucins in Marseille, where Sade stayed in 1772, in a house where he and his valet, Latour, have an all-night orgy with four young prostitutes, feeding them the aphrodisiacal Spanish fly extract; about this, he is to be procured (he’s on the run) and decapitated—

He wanted to grope around and lick those hollows in the stone upon which Sade and the women must have trampled. This was the most positive, the most honest of all his emotions concerning Sade.

 
He wants to lick the stone.
        He doesn’t—

Tanaka leant against the wall and began wondering what it was about those hollows in the stone which aroused in him that numbing sensation.

That is the Endoic tragedy. To have not licked it. Placed your image, your tongue, right there.

Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day

It is not a question of any particular kiss, but rather that the kiss, in itself, opens on to the bite, and the taste of blood. And consequently it is a question of another well known coupling, that of Eros and Thanatos: not in a dialectic of opposites, but in a mutual excitation and exasperation, each asking the other to go further, to go all the way to the end, to get completely lost. —Jean-Luc Nancy, “Icon of Fury,” 2008

In Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001), it is just like that.
        Like The Sea and Poison, it tells of medical experimentation, human subjects. Dr. Léo Sémeneau uses mosses, plants derived in colonized space—Guyana—to work on issues of the nervous system, the libido, on a fellow doctor, Dr. Shane Brown, and on his own wife, Coré. The treatment has gone thick. Béatrice Dalle and Vincent Gallo (uh oh) are so sick with interest in eating, actually, who they fuck. They can’t keep it down. It’s a human vivification.
        I read Nancy’s 2008 essay (his film criticism?) as pure fanfic—his desire to be inside of it, to be with this film, to enact the film in his bloodraving own sentences. I read it years before I saw Trouble Every Day.
        I felt I had seen it.
        I knew I could not see it.
        I’ve fainted at so many things, at, let’s see—
        Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts at La Colombe in Fishtown (Philly), I staggered to the bathroom and took off my shirt (hot) and crumpled on a toilet. It was the sink-top castration of Brad, I think.
        Under the Banner of Heaven, I was on a Greyhound bus to Seattle in 2009, thinking I’d move there, politely blacking out in my seat, coming to only to the interminable trip still. Krakauer’s depiction of knife-murder, quiet and certain, caused, in me, psychologically, tossed salad, scrambled eggs…
        Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, I was on the back patio at Good Karma (Philadelphia more), it was that combination of drinking blood and the whole intimated feeling of heroin addiction, plus pedophilia, it’s the combinations that make me faint. The Sea and Poison, in the back bedroom in North Adams, MA, 2020, its final vivisection scene where they cut into their patient’s lung in order to see how long cutting it would take to be a death. Blood is washing onto the floor. Drains will do it.
So one has to be careful, so I held Denis’ film, red, under my tongue for years, wrapped up in Nancy’s essay.
        I was sucking on it through the paper.

When I watched it, I could.
        I’ve watched it many times. I still close and squint and pass my eyes onto the ceiling, that waiting emollient of eyesight.
        I can’t watch it all.
        I listened to its soundtrack, in 2012, while writing my first novel, The University of Pennsylvania (2014), and only, too, while I was menstruating. I put myself in a Pavlovian situation for sure. You could play its soundtrack (by Tindersticks), and I would menstruate for you and I’d move to write the same story again about eternal bleeding. 

At the end of this film is a scene of rape and murder. Dr. Shane Brown cannot suppress his issue. About the fuck-eating. He corners a hotel maid in her hotel’s basement, and he rapes her, and he bites her vagina.
        The nose.
        It’s unlike the earlier parts of this movie. It’s not what you think the movie is doing, despite its previous violences which were more stylish, they had a milieu. It moves into a totally brutal third act.
        I think about Denis’ domination, and her collaboration, her dominocollaboration with Gallo and Florence Loiret Caille, who plays this maid, and with Agnes Godard, her cinematographer. She might have held Agnes’ back—she says she does this often in their work together—as it’s being filmed, holding her cinematographer’s back, beholding the rape, making rape with marigold wool.
        A color of extreme intensity, saturated. The rape is like the sun with its head ripped off. It is such an extreme scene. The director is driving this train, conductrice, she makes it so very violent, so furious and so worse, it is iconic, it is hers. She is the worst, the most. She refuses others the position. She removes the filming of rape, the making of rape, from the domain of others who would want to make it theirs, dominating Gallo, telling him what to do, how to act, when to stop, he is surrounded.

Portable Shrine

I wrote this whole book, The University of Pennsylvania, about a college student who menstruates a lot out of a double womb (“womb duplicatum”) at that esteemed, perennial school in Philadelphia. I wrote it in Montana, then in Utah. And I wrote a second novel (in Massachusetts) that takes place at Good Karma, a coffee shop of this city I was born in, and, two days before I was, my mother’s OB rapes her in his office at the hospital, where I was born two days later, growing up to write a third novel, a comedy about gynecological crime set in Philadelphia and in homage to Shusaku Endo’s The Sea and Poison. But I haven’t managed to be gainfully employed in the city.
I didn’t even know that when I was writing it. I told my mother what I was up to (I said, “Don’t worry, I’m not writing about you this time,” to which she said, “You are writing about me. Funny thing.” She hadn’t said it to anyone ever before). Later—I’d been walking around in a bludgeoned manner, with this news—she said, “Include what happened in your novel.”
In Philadelphia, my jobs have only been odd. I’ve made some money as the official underwear-washer of the long-running show Menopause the Musical, and at a movie theater, and at a fucked-up bookstore. I got $5 per theatre review once for something called The Philadelphia Theatre Review, from a man named something like Frank who sent me checks, sweet Frank, and I adjuncted at the now closed (dubiously) University of the Arts, 3200/class, which is, frankly, like a $5 check. I interviewed, once, to work at a different fucked up bookstore. I was implored by its owner to write a review of Philip Roth’s Everyman, which I did promptly, it was published, I saw it there, in his bookstore’s newsletter, I guess he published job applications there, never again contacting the applicants, the women, I’m sure, the young everywomen, I’m sure he had a scheme to traffic all of our generous, job-wanting thoughts about Roth, without pay or notice.

I live in Cleveland, where I have found a job. Cleveland has given me some things I have long been searching for.
It’s a shame.
Because in Philadelphia, I am comfortable and confident, knowledgeable about interaction and being. My usual experience of overwhelming amounts of disorientation in space, and about what is happening, recedes lushly in my living-in-Philadelphia system. I know where I am in that grid. I believe I stand somewhat, affectively, on the shoulders of my mom’s work as a paralegal at Community Legal Services for over 30 years. In my interactions at, say, Rittenhouse Market, buying a kombucha and a banana, I am confident in part (eye-contact, joking, knowing where I fucking am) because of my mom’s public service in the city, her contributions to its social fabric, her workaday determination to believe and stand, before judges, for people who were in need of disability assistance from the city, herself disabled, so, sitting—her tiny apartment in South Philadelphia, the pottery that is there.
In Cleveland, my office is nearby the Cleveland Museum of Art (world class and free, it’s extremely nice) and in a novel middle age (42), I’m fastened rapturously to its vast wing of antiquities. I’ve never felt this way before about them.

A Tibetan portable shrine from 1500 is on the younger side. The oldest thing here is from 3000 BC, a potentially Western Anatolian “stargazer” of translucent marble. Tiny. The portable shrine from Tibet is diminutive, as well, and carved from a single log of wood, with mineral and metal elements.
        Its figures practice Tantric Buddhism, its details—detailing is—are so so tantric. The minutest toe, arm, figures of prayer and action, one might be biting a leather strap, in what seems the lush overhangs of forest stuff, these details and arms coming from the wet, wood-dark depths of this miniaturish space. You could close it up. It has hinges. You can’t. It’s within glass.
        And yes I feel I want to lick it. To feel my tongue going in the grooves of the many bodies positioned in the forest in the log in three rows going across three panels that can close. Blackish. I would like to feel the ridges of the details, and this extremely exquisite corrugation of these protectors therein of Tantric Buddhism, rippling in a millioness of knobs, toes, strap, on my tongue, completely lost.
        Writing to a friend about it all: Maybe we are all just very very young, very silly. Maybe humanity is just silly string, David. But that can’t be true—look at antiquities. 
        I want to lose my face in this shrine, in Cleveland. Its name suggests I could take it with me. But the glass. Propriety. There’s respect. The closest I would get is if I accidentally, coming so very close to look, bump my nose on this glass. Would, I’ve long held, is a warbling word.

∩

Caren Beilin is the author of the novel Sea, Poison (New Directions, 2025). Her previous books include Revenge of the Scapegoat (Dorothy, 2022)—winner of the Vermont Book Award for Fiction—Blackfishing the IUD (Wolfman Books, 2019), Spain (Rescue Press, 2018), The University of Pennsylvania (Noemi Press, 2014), and the chapbook Americans, Guests, or Us (Diagram/New Michigan Press, 2012). Some of these titles have been published abroad with The Last Books (Amsterdam) and los tres editores (Madrid). She lives in Cleveland and is an Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University.

One Story

Inter-Species Solutions

I

A friend of mine from the West Coast once mentioned that he had a purebred family living in his guesthouse. Before I could even ask him what he meant, his daughter also moved into his guesthouse and I quickly realized that they too were ‘integrated’ animal-human hybrids or ‘coyote people,’ complete with hind legs, feral eyes, and even a skinny tail. I was offered a ‘traditional hybrid meal’ which consists of boiled carrion, an assortment of mosquitoes and flies, and French onion soup ‘for good measure,’ I was told. The meal was meticulously prepared and not a moment was wasted as this was not just mealtime; it was a strategic refueling. We drank puddle water out of pint glasses. It had rained the night before. After supper, we all discussed the Federal Reserve. My friend’s daughter began diving into future interest rates and fiscal mismanagement. Future paths must include balance sheets. She knew more than my friend and I combined. I wasn’t surprised. Unlike other hybrids, human coyotes can speak perfect English and often have a surprising vocabulary. A human-coyote hybrid usually possesses the ability to manage finances for the rest of the hybrid community. Soon enough, when you go to H&R Block to do your taxes, you will see a feral coyote-human eager to take on the job! Just remember that every human coyote is different, so don’t expect every one of them to have such a keen eye for numbers.

II

I have a super clean graduate student currently living in my fire escape. Well, technically two, counting myself. We are both down here. Both of us are non-matriculated but course-intensive. We like what we like and that’s what we do. Enough of the silky stuff. Real talk. Gamers only. We play war games. We have long talks. We talk forever. There’s no conflict. There’s no cause for alarm. We’re still in school. What are the chances you’ve seen us? How do you expect us to care if you think we aren’t doing what we should be? How could we become what we were if we weren’t likely to become what we could be? The choices, although our very own, are miscalculated and without purpose. The purposes are convenient, untroubled, and always expected. Check your privilege. Check the place you last checked. My grievance is with the place, not what happened there. Feel your hands within the place they should have been. There is a milky place you can’t personify. A likely place you came to become immersed in. My graduation ceremony wasn’t canceled, it was postponed to a later date. The date was today so here you are celebrating my graduation with me. We did it. The three of us. Let’s drink. Let’s have drinks. Let’s raise the roof! Let’s have a toast! Raise your glass to the place you came from, and go back! Let’s go celebrate on the roof because it won’t be another fiscal year until we can go back inside.

III

A decent roommate is a rare species, most often an inconvenience, in my case no exception. My options and time were limited so I looked to the hybrid community for answers. The first detail I noticed about hybrids is that contrary to popular belief they do not prefer to live among each other and instead prefer thoroughbred humans for company. C’est la vie. As far as I am concerned, I do not have any coyote lineage, but you never know. Sometimes surprises exist where we least expect them. I was surprised to learn there were two coyote-hybrids on the board of trustees at my alma-mater. There were three initially, but one went to work for the coast guard after growing tired of the academic life. I get it. I’ve had to move around, which is why it’s been so hard to find someone dependable who isn’t just a random off Craigslist or Friendfinder. No, someone like that would not work at all. Also, I do not have the luxury of living on the West Coast or in New England, so options vary. Sometimes one has to cut their losses as an effort towards practicality. My friend from the West Coast introduced me to the surrogate coyote humans he knew via Skype and through their resources I met a coyote human who was living a mere fifteen miles away right by the Civic Center. “Love can never die,” was tattooed on their forearm in cursive script. We were off to an OK start.

IV

My new rule is no grad students in my fire escape or anywhere in my building. I have spoken to the superintendent and she agrees with me; hybrids work both smarter and harder than grad students. The super clean one who was living in my fire escape is now aware of the fact that he has to leave and he is admittedly scorned. I told him that I had taken him and his studies seriously and he merely replied, “Why do you think you can control the narrative?” Too much education. Every time I lay out the primary issue with him staying here he says I have “coopted the narrative” or I am attempting to bring in the more interesting hybrid character before I have made a proper introduction or resolution for his whiny antics. Every evening there are Sutter Home bottles in the hallway and he has been requesting to use the hallway supply closet to take sponge baths which he knows is both unacceptable and unsanitary. When he offers to share his Sutter Home with me I try to explain to him it isn’t even his wine! He has taken the supplies for the superintendent’s daughter’s spring jubilee, an event planned for several months. No more war games. No more sleeping on the fire escape. No more dialectic arguments with the day laborers who have been trying to fix the roof for over a year now despite this layabout in the fire escape, enough is enough. Time to clean up shop and circle back to the blonde district near the Science Center.

V

Hybrid living is sort of like van life; not all it is cracked up to be. My new hybrid roommate had a few ideas that made me even more uncomfortable than my last roommate. I was under the impression hybrids have ways to “cover up” their exposed areas with a loin cloth or a harness. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Within the first few hours, I was a mere inches away from my new hybrid roommate’s family jewels as he insisted on doing pilates in the common space while watching Nip/Tuck. Every morning the drain was also clogged because of the coarse hair from his tail. Each shower was over an hour long. The smell was too much. The water bill became unreasonable and I tried not to make a big deal at first but suddenly I found myself wading through inches of gray bathwater. Out of a strange passive-aggressive impulse, one day I allowed the water backflow to flood the entire bathroom while he was focused on his pilates. I scampered down my private balcony and watched from street view. He did nothing! The whole place flooded and this was completely normal to him. Up until this moment I hadn’t realized every mammal has a learning curve. Inter-special relations are not as simple as they appear from a tertiary glance. Property damage is very serious and can be held over your head for the rest of your life! Before making the same mistake I did, be sure to do some serious research and don’t just go along with the trends.

VI

Now that I have graduated, I can take some time to reflect. Through alumni services I have managed to stay in touch with the culture on campus and I have attended several functions. There was recently an adaptation of “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof,” that was full of some of the finest young coyote-hybrid castmates I have ever seen. They all shined in their different roles. Maggie was more beautiful than I ever remember, she hid her tail, while Brick just let his proudly flow. Of course, I have forgiven my old roommate for the damages he caused in our old living space. It turns out, having a skinny tail can be a hinderence no matter where you live, which you can watch in great detail on “Coyote Home Remodeling,” weeknights on HGTV. It turns out there are much bigger problems out there than a couple fixable holes in the wall. I wish I wasn’t so uptight back then. Live and learn, I guess. The world is so different from what it was when I began my degree. Hybrid studies are now all the rage! There is a whole program now focused on the future of human-hybrid relations—it’s history in the making. Support is finally here. That’s right! There are now several endowment programs set in place to put an emphasis for new coyote-friendly resources on campus. There is an option for eating “small mammals” in the cafeteria. There are also puddle water and river water options at the soda fountain. Yes, I have tried both, and I still prefer birch beer. Old habits die hard.

COYOTE-HYBRID CAST STUNS AUDIENCE IN UNIVERSITY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS ADAPTATION

The cast and crew of “Cat On A
Hot Tin Roof,” comprised of six
all coyote-human hybrid cast-
mates, brought tears and standing
ovation to audiences this Saturday.
‘We’re extremely proud of the way
this show turned out, but this
group always seems to impress us
and remind us why we are here,’
said Faculty Advisor Betty Preston.
The production took place at
Tribunal University, and was
directed by former student actor
and current drama instructor
Justin House (52) who recently
accepted a Jimmy award for last
year’s outstanding production of
Neil Simon’s “Sweet Charity.”
This is the first fully “Hybrid”
stage production we have seen
so far from the team at Tribunal.
“It’s only left us wanting more,”
remarked sophomore Julian SMITH.”

THEATRE REVIEW 9-18-25, AP

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Alex Hampshire (born 1985) is a coyote enthusiast as well as the author of Furniture Activism (hysterically real), Techno Pest Management, Law Culture, Charity/Extortion, National Water (Lunar Chandelier), Red Light Camera Ahead (CWD), Appreciate The Pre-Decisions (New Books), and the upcoming full-length Have Fun Pretending, which will be available later this month from The Creative Writing Department. He oversees the newly established imprint Waste Management. His work has appeared in Fence, Clock, Boxx, DaisyWorld, Gerry Mulligan, Death and Life of American Cities, Elective Affinities, Baited Area, New Hunter’s Review, Gauss PDF, and other publications.

One Poem

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Mike Corrao is the author of several books including Being Towards Death, Gut Text, and Surface Studies. He lives in the Midwest.