One Story

In the Wilderness of Sinai

Levi sat in an old diner waiting for his breakfast to come out. He was smoking and scraping up eggs. It was a long week waiting for the end of the world. The face of God had turned away from him. He was alone again. His rabbi in Boca Raton was worried, said he should stop trying to get hired by the Company. But it was the only thing Levi knew how to want—professional advancement. After his girlfriend left him, he sought out sex clubs with seedy reputations. He tossed ones at girls rubbed down in glitter. Miami bored him. There was nothing behind the women’s facade. At work, there was always more to discover. Another chemical compound behind another chemical compound. He paid his bill and got back in his car. The sun cascaded down on him, beads of sweat turning into little waterfalls down his forehead. His shoulders were a little burnt from the light through the windshield. He hated wearing a white wife beater but it was too hot for anything else.

            Driving down the Overseas Highway blasting an old Nirvana CD from his brother, Levi tried to make sense of his job prospects.

            The Company had called him and asked him to come down to the Keys. They had a special lab there out in the swampy-ass ocean of nowhere. That’s what the hiring manager said anyway. Levi was surprised he was a man. The professional-sounding masculine voice told him to show up on November 12. They would pay for a hotel since it was remote. Or he could opt to stay on the island where the lab was. A boat would take him in the morning and he could decide before the last ride back at four. It sounded like an eat-the-rich situation. He wasn’t sure it was the kind of gig he would ever escape. His last job fired him after he was accused of “inappropriate speech” in the work place. An expletive-laden report on his programming team’s progress.

            For so long, Levi wanted to be the kind of company guy everyone praised. Focused, determined, beloved. But he was too intense. All the brushstrokes of his paintings were visible. Any new project he turned on stank of his desperation to look good to the higher-ups. No one thought he would be able to make it beyond the lower-level programming jobs. It took him years to master all the languages. Even Python puzzled him.

            His hotel was in Key West. The Company booked it for him a few weeks ago. All expenses paid. They encouraged him to contribute to the local tourism industry since he opted to stay there. They preferred for the locals to like them. In the morning the boat would come and take him away, he had a whole evening to enjoy however he wanted. But they knew what he was going to do. The low crackling voice made that clear.

            It was a strange phone call. Not one he wanted to repeat. Levi almost wanted to tank the interview so he could say he tried his best and go back to his normal life. Something like his last job. Algorithms, robotic programming, nanotechnology start-ups that never worked. The last one he worked on was called Dragonfly and involved trying to make the tiniest drone he could. They kept throwing money at him until it was clear he was trying increasingly bizarre tactics. When they found him reading the Zohar on the job, they fired him. That was what sent him back to Miami. His brother mocked him every morning about being the rich as fuck jobless one their parents were more proud of even though his brother was the one with the stable job, wife, and two kids. Youngest child privilege.

A few hours later, Levi pulled into the hotel parking lot, lit up by tropical neon and decked out with offensive and obnoxious little tiki gods. That wasn’t even local, just a mistaken migration. He waited a few minutes before going on in, smoking another cigarette and getting the lay of the land. The sun was almost completely below the horizon line. He hadn’t been out this far since he was a kid. A stray cat wound its way across the gravel to him and mewed. Brushing a fly aside, he leaned down to pet the scared little guy before realizing the creature was gnawing on his shoe. Levi lightly kicked it away and walked inside to get his room key.

Talia was the name she gave him on the phone. He doubted that was her actual name, but didn’t press. The TV crackled across from him. The girl’s photo still glimmered on his phone. He wasn’t sure what to say despite having done this a few times now. Just accepted the rate and tried to gauge her interest over the phone. Sometimes he read sex worker reddit threads, looked to see what they did and didn’t like in their clients. Every once in a while, on a break from work, he’d crack open an IPA and smoke a black American Spirit while reading one of their memoirs. Always memoirs. There were one or two real stylists, some theory-heads, but he wasn’t sure what to make of those. He preferred when he could look down at the book rather than holding it up to the light like a confusing academic article.

            When she finally knocked an hour after his intake call, he was spick and span. Showered twice. Smile. Let her in. The room was grimier than he was. Couldn’t be helped. He wasn’t the proprietor.

            “Hi,” Talia said low, quiet, breathless. It was good, Levi thought. Not too overdone but it got the point across.

            “Hi,” he said. “Levi.”

            “Talia. But I guess you know that. Do you have cash?”

            She was all the way in his room now. There was no need for violence, but he wondered what it would be like, to not feel remorse. That was his problem. The guilt. Textbook nutcase with a cushy job.

            He gestured toward a stack of hundreds on a table.

            “You still want five hours?”

            Levi nodded silently. She walked over to him as if in appreciation and started fondling his shoulders. Rehearsed, choreographed, yet mostly natural. He was analyzing her performance. Rating her moves, how aroused he got.

            It didn’t need to be efficient. In fact, he gave points if she surprised him. But that almost never happened. He knew he wasn’t special, he was just another connoisseur and she was an amateur. No matter, in Key West there was no reason to be the best.

            She moved rhythmically, slowly letting his dick slosh inside her, not quite hard enough to do any damage. The dull wet feeling didn’t do much for him. Not that it was her fault, he was swimming in too many unnamed feelings. That always prevented him from finishing. Talia tried to pant and whine to speed him up, scooching up and down on him faster as she touch his bare chest with her lacy little fingers. The red nail polish was just starting to chip.

            If only he could fake it. Could pretend it was a dry one. But Levi had some dignity anyway, wanted to try and bare with her for the ride. She was going to try until he told her to stop or the time ran out.

            “Wait a second,” he said after she squeezed her breasts in front of his foggy gaze. “Can we pause?”

            “Sure,” she said. “That’s fine, yeah.”

            Talia demounted and Levi realized he was fully flaccid.

            “You ever fucked someone who’s uncut?” he asked.

            “Is that what gets you hot?” she said, putting the gum in her purse away again, ready to be done with him.

            “No,” Levi replied. “I just wondered.”

            “Most of the guys around are circumcised, sure, but not everyone. I’ve had a few.”

            “Did you like it?”

            She shot him a weird look and he swallowed it whole, digesting her ire with ease. He didn’t look away or say anything else.

            “Sometimes.”

            They still had a lot of time, at least two hours, and she had a feeling he was a big tipper. Her glittery emerald lingerie lay neatly folded on the one chair in the room.

            “Why are you here?”

            “Job interview.”

            “Are you Rob the Doll’s new keeper?”

            “No,” he said. “That’s not why I’m here.”

            “Do you know the story though?”

            “Yeah,” he said.

            “Creeps me out.”

            “Want to have a cigarette outside?”

            He wanted to kill time. Careful not to think about the last time he saw Riley. She was back in the Bay probably, unless she went back to Omaha after her surgery. Poor thing. She wanted him to take care of her before he fucked it all up.

            Talia took out her own pack and lit a Virginia Slim. He laughed at her without thinking. She didn’t tell him to fuck off. They stood silently watching the few stars they could see blink and the ocean waves curling against the shore. He heard the cat mewing before he saw it again, crawling across the gravel towards them.

            “Hi little guy,” Levi said. “Should we go get him cat food?”

            Talia took another puff and looked down at him on the ground with just a hint of annoyance.

In the morning, Levi drove to the synagogue a few blocks away from the seaside motel. Amid melting palms and mandrakes, the old stone building stood majestically, a beauty, he thought to himself. Since his mom passed he’d only gone to temple a few times, usually only for the High Holy Days. But he was right back where he always was, feeling small and hopeful. Maybe salvation lay beyond the door. He’d been around too many Gentiles, all goyishly trying to tell him about their stance on Middle-Eastern politics without prompting. They felt guilty in a way he never did. Only the thought of avoiding services made him break out in a cold sweat. Those people over there were only dimly related to him. His mother was a fan of Edward Said and Real Housewives, the weirdest there ever was. She wanted to kiss him goodbye every morning as he went off to his Catholic school. “This is the melting pot of America,” she said. Her mother was Ukrainian and her father was Irish. They met in Brooklyn before swiftly moving down to Florida and Anglicizing their last name in the late seventies. She gave birth to Levi late in life, saying it was a blessing from the Holy One. All of this he swallowed with a grain of salt, wishing the palimpsest world she outlined was the one they lived in. Wished she gave his world more order, meaning.

            He was going to meet a rather obscure Kabbalist, one of the few known practitioners in Florida. It was early, only five-thirty or so. The boat was at seven. Plenty of time to discuss the possibility of a Tzadik ha-Dor.

            It wasn’t like Levi believed any of it. He just wanted to talk with someone who had beliefs beyond science. The stuff of life beyond life: the aftertaste of spirits.

            The rabbi had emailed him beforehand. They would speak for only twenty minutes. A short time to get to the bottom of things, but maybe he knew what Levi was really after. An argument. That would work well too, if he didn’t put up much of a fight, it would confirm his own take on things. Life and loss and the whole damn thing. His father used to talk a lot about Catholics with clenched teeth. He hated their conviction and ceremony, the strange deification of Jesus. After Levi’s father converted he was all in. Ready to fight the savior himself, just come down from the cross and throw a punch.

            “Hello Levi,” the rabbi said at the door. The old man led him into a small study cluttered with papers. “Have you come to try and make meaning out of your life?”

            Levi sunk into an old wooden chair. The room was full of stale-smelling books and diagrams and the one window was shuttered. Stones peered out from behind the small amount of space the bookshelves didn’t cover.

            “Maybe,” he said. “Can I smoke?”

            The rabbi gestured. There wasn’t much meaning to it, but Levi lit up anyway.

            “What do you make of the Tzadik ha-Dor?”

            “Why? What do you make of him?”

            “You think one’s alive right now?”

            “No, not necessarily,” the rabbi said.

            “I think he is. Or, if he is, in the sense that anyone could be the messiah if we put our minds to it. Save the people.”

            “You want to save God’s chosen people?”

            “Why not everyone? With science even. Easier that way.”

            “I see. So you’re a humanist, not a Zionist.”

            “Not a Zionist. A scientist. I work in nanotechnology.”

            “So what you’re saying is—”

            “Yes,” Levi interrupted.

            “That you think you’re the Tzadik ha-Dor?”

            “In a sense, yes.”

            The rabbi laughed and laughed.

            “Then I think we’re done here. I think we’ve covered the meaning in your life. Maybe there’s too much instead of too little.”

            He stood up and gestured for Levi to head to the door.

            “I’m about to have a job interview.”

The rabbi nodded, oblivious.

“Something called Project Nazareth.”

            The geezer’s eyes narrowed.

            “You’re going to regret this one day. You could have had a nice long chat with me and instead you chose—” Levi looked at his watch, less than twenty minutes even, hardly eight. “Eight minutes with the Tzadik.”

            “Mmmm.”

            Levi walked out and headed toward the dock, ready to meet his maker now that he felt confirmed in his righteousness.

***

The small motorboat took them across the clear blue water without incident. It was already heating up despite the early hour. Levi smoked the whole way, saying nothing to the two sailors who seemed to be punching below their weight. They mumbled softly about the weather to each other. He wondered if they read Hemingway on their off-time. Real men. Not the kind of financiers and gamers he worked alongside, they let their shit go online paying for webcam access to their ex-girlfriend. Boys and men were not so different in Levi’s estimation. One side of the spectrum just had more money for wish fulfillment. Men were sometimes even more envious. At his last job, Dragonfly, his co-workers all got blasted afterwards on the boss’s Cognac and Japanese whiskey. They even mixed the two into a feral potion. A bachelor bacchanalia.

            Men love corners. They love towers. Playing cards and broken glass, numbers ticking on a screen, projections, the image feedback loop. The slight slip of lacy black panties. Hints of debauchery, a misplaced word spoken in desire of fortune or lust. Desire meant one thing: scoring. Levi knew this because he felt it too. But he felt the desire to be the best too, to have one over on the others. That’s why they couldn’t stand him at Dragonfly, they knew he felt—or was—superior. A tower.

            The sailors didn’t think about gender so illustriously. They dumped Levi on the shore, a small rickety dock. No questions. There was just a job to be done.

            No one greeted him on the little island. There was a giant steel compound surrounded by a few smaller huts. Like Gilligan’s Island with a power plant. Wisteria and palm trees overran the brush. A few banyan trees loomed in the distance, maybe there was a lagoon he couldn’t see. The water was hysterically blue like a postcard for heaven. As he cut into the lush green he started to spot the flowers. Not all of them were instantly recognizable, vicious pinks and reds and oranges. Hibiscus. He knew that one. Birds twittered and chirped away, some pecking against wood. It was far more vibrant than in town, the neon and tourists cutting through any flora and fauna there actually was. He thought of his conversation with Talia and wondered if she made house calls. She wouldn’t care much about the surroundings. Or maybe she would, glad to get a break from the brown mucky of cheap motels and gray alleys.

            “Hello,” a voice called from somewhere behind the thicket of flowers.

            “Hello?” Levi said.

            A man in white appeared as if out of nowhere.

            “I’m Christian. We spoke on the phone last week.”

            “Yes, hello,” Levi reached out his hand and shook the older man’s grip. He was probably reaching fifty. Moderate build, no real muscle mass to speak of, wearing black work boots and a disheveled lab outfit. Bald, because, of course he was. No one with that much intellect worried about their hair. Levi wondered if they shared the same indulgence in the world’s oldest affection. He wanted to stop thinking about sex, but it kept coming back, like a hamster wheel. All his meds were in his backpack but he didn’t want to lose the upper-hand and dig into it now. The interview had begun.

            Slowly they made their way through the plumeria toward the big metal dome. Levi didn’t spot anyone else as they walked. There had to be others for a project this size.

            “If you accept this job, you’ll stay here with me. Could be a few years, could be decades. But the work is that important.”

            Levi didn’t ask why. He already knew why he had been chosen. All his bones vibrated in alignment at the thought, wet and sticky on his thigh like triumph.

            “This is Project Nazareth,” the man in white said. “We want to use some of your ideas in order to do more precise surgery.”

            “To help people?”

            The man hesitated, unsure how to clear the egotist’s doubt. “Yes, to help people. Everyone, really. You see… there’s a problem. We’re headed toward chaos. Everyone will eventually evolve too much too quickly.”

            “Evolve? Like, Darwinianly?”

            “Yes,” Christian said. “People will grow things they have no use for.”

            “How do you know this?”

            He shrugged. “Charts. Projections.”

            “You have a test case, don’t you?”

            The scientist smiled. “Of course.”

            “Show me,” Levi said.

            “Gladly.”

Lights flashed on and off all around them. Green, blue, yellow, LEDs of all colors. Steel poles jutting up like pikes. Long beams overhead rigged for the show. Scalpels, surgery tables like Messianic crosses, syringes, and what looked like medieval torture devices. Levi was just waiting to be shown leeches. Hisses and smoke purring from large machines producing very little output. Things trying to produce smaller and smaller probes. Clamps and retractors and suture packs avalanched off long metal tables. A giant saw caught his attention. As he walked over to it, he came across a pile of animal carcasses. Waste. Sheep mostly. Cattle. A pig.

            “We want to get to both rats, so we can prove we can do this on the tiniest of scales. You see, we’ll have to be very precise.”

            “Larger than a cow?” Levi quipped.

            The man was standing in front of a table with a single human arm.

            “What the fuck is that?”

            “Not a cow.”

            “What is all this for?”

            “Like I said. People will soon—and in some cases already have—grow things they have no use for. Look at this.”

            The man was already wearing gloves and a long white apron. It was pointless, as he cut into the forearm blood spattered everywhere, on clothes, on the table. He was careless. This was just a butcher show.

            Levi looked closer. There was a tiny thorn with its own nerves intertwined with the arm’s actual nervous system.

            “What the hell?”

            Christian put everything down.

            “This,” he said, throwing away the apron in a bin, “is an angel disease. There’s no official known cause or origin. Could be alien for all I know. They named it that cause they think it’s Biblical. I’m not so sure.”

            “The coming of the Tzadik…”

            “Hm?”

            “Nothing,” Levi croaked. “Doesn’t matter.”

            “So, before such a nightmarish plague becomes a pandemic, we’re trying to create the tech to deal with it. Top secret, privately funded, of course, though the government occasionally stops in to see how we’re progressing.”

            “How many people have it?”

            “Right now? Less than a dozen a year. In the next few decades? Who knows.”

            “How long do we have?”

            “If we hire you… I’d say no more than twenty years. Probably less.”

            They stood in silence. Levi was contemplating the pure strangeness of this. The nearness of it all to the spiritual.

            “So what’s next?”

            “I’ll let you stay the night. Meet the others. Eat with us tonight and we’ll see how you get on. Of course, how well you work with others is also a factor.”

            “Of course,” Levi smirked.

            “This doesn’t scare you at all? And you’re convinced?”

            He simply smiled in return. Had he not been waiting his whole life for the end?   

A soggy bowl of root vegetables sat on the cherrywood table before him. Levi ate a few bites before looking at the guests around him. Four men and one woman. They drank their green tea quietly. No one seemed ready to break the ice.

            “Just tea? You don’t have any liquor?” he jested.

            “We try not to have too many stimulants,” Christian said.

            “Right,” Levi said.

            “I could go for a drink actually,” the woman said without looking up from her plate.

            “And you think that would help you work better?”

            “I don’t know,” the woman said. “I just think it would be nice. Don’t you ever want something purely for the experience it offers?”

            Christian looked at her, bewildered, waiting for more. But that was all she offered. She pushed the veggies on her plate around as Levi watched. Was it evil to be sure? So soon? That she was the one?

            In his mind’s eye Levi saw a whole kingdom. He would kill all the dybbuks and demons and ghouls his grandfather told him about. Through science, not the Torah, and even then maybe G-d would have to bow down to him. This wasn’t a conscious thought, about G-d bowing, but it loomed in the back somewhere with the heavenly host Levi thought he commanded. The egotist didn’t think he was capable of blasphemy or self-deceit, only truth. The blanket that covers all else: vicious honesty told with a straight face. He couldn’t know if he was lying. That wasn’t in his nature. The stories that resonated with him were of Moses looking out over Israel, not the time he struck the rock and was punished not to see the new world he set up.

            The woman had moved on. She was almost done eating and was talking to another man. Asian, mid-thirties with a buzzcut.

            “How long has this been going on?” Another man said behind him. He tried to listen in to the dueling voices.

            “A few weeks, a month, I don’t know,” the other said.

            “And they’re for sure giving us the funding?”

            “Yes, they are. We can build a real hospital. A cover.”

            “What made them change their mind?”

            The other man made a physical gesture that Levi couldn’t make out.

            “Good. Good, okay… We should tell Christian. Maybe we can finally move bases. Fucking hate the Keys. A hurricane every other day.”

            “God’s plan.”

            They laughed. 

            Levi excused himself to go out and smoke. He didn’t want to sit and listen to the cloak and dagger politics of the pharmaceutical industry. Whatever they had to do to keep the lab running was their business. He was just coming to do whatever it was that needed done.

            The humidity seized his body. Even just walking out and sliding down against the wall he was sweating bullets. This wasn’t where he would’ve built a lab. But maybe no one bothered them here. Clearly it was all very top secret. He would have to lie about what his work was, why he was in Florida. There wasn’t really anyone to tell but still. His parents would hardly ask. They just wanted to be rid of him. They’d secretly wish it was farther away.

            He took out his flask and gurgled at least a shot’s worth of hot liquor. Everything was fried. Anyone else would’ve left it behind, said it was impossible, a farce, a secret cabal. He loved exclusivity.

            She slipped down beside him against the steel wall, crouching in the weeds. Sea roses and dandelions flowered in front of them. Without asking, she took his flask and sipped before passing the whiskey back to him. Still very beautiful, Levi thought.

            “I hate whiskey,” she said.

            “Well it isn’t yours.”

            She smiled at him, the crinkles around her lips appearing like small fissures of time.

            “I’m Mira.”

            “Levi.”

            “Ah.”

            “What?” he said, surprised at her tone.

            “Christian said he was bringing in a young guy from the States. That’s you.”

            “My mother is Polish. My father’s Irish.”

            “Were they born there?”

            “No,” he said. “Were you born outside the US?”

            “Yes. I’m here on a work visa thanks to Christian.”

            “Where are you from?”

            She cringed a little, moved slightly away from him in the breeze.

            “Should I make you guess?”

            Levi laughed. He liked her.

            “Please, God, no.”

            “India. But I’ve been abroad most of my life. Scotland, Australia, Sweden, Denmark. I’m a very cosmopolitan woman. I grew up watching Jeopardy with my dad while he worked at a nuclear reactor during the day.”

            “And your mom?” Levi found himself wanting to know more in spite of himself. His upper hand, his swagger, was faltering.

            “Oh she stayed home most of the time but she was a great concert pianist. We had to excel. That was how we got to see the world.”

            “And now you’re stuck on this little island.”

            “It’s not so bad,” Mira said. “I get to see what a little runt like you is made of.”

            She took his flask and walked off, downing nearly the whole thing in the process. Funny, he realized he didn’t even care.

            The voices inside died down as Levi walked around the grounds. It wasn’t a huge island, he traversed most of the expanse in an hour of wandering. Planes jetted overhead every so often, the leviathans of cruise ships docked in the distance. The sky purpled and faded into strata of indigo and ink. The palm trees and brush made it hard to work his way back toward the beach in the darkness, but he did his best to make it to the docks. There was only one vehicle. A small motorboat presumably for emergencies. The grime of the sand irritated his feet. He wanted to feel clean on the beach and instead felt a growing shrill voice in his mind. Fuck the summer.

            The last time he spent more than a few moments with his feet on the sand he was high out of his skull on acid standing next to a hooker he hired and subsequently refused to touch. No real reason why, he just didn’t feel like it. He liked that it made her nervous. Them in public, the electric green rush to the brain. In the end she walked off with her heels in hand back toward the mainland. He stayed on the beach until the sun rose and said a prayer, a blessing for the new year.

            That was a little less than a year ago. The year had been fruitful. It led to this.

***

August 13

Unbearably hot. Of course Christian hired me. What else was he going to do? I’m sick. Have been the past few nights, nauseous and gassy. Grotesque. He keeps coming to check on me, which is nice. Only asked about Mira once. She was busy working on her end of the deal—which Christian won’t tell me about for some reason. Annoying. It’s all very smoke and mirrors here. It’s only been a week and already I think of bolting sometimes. Not seriously, just the idea of leaving. Taking a flight to Toronto, Tokyo, Thailand, anywhere but here and this heat.

Christian says I’ll get used to it. He keeps bringing me concoctions. Smoothies and bowls and broth. I try to get it down but it’s shit. I want to be free of this mortal coil. Or whatever. Keep thinking of this girl Carly I used to know. I paid for her first abortion when we were in high school. She told me she only fucked me cause she felt sorry for me. Why her? I should try and phone the rabbi again. Haha. That’d be a laugh. He must hate me.

They say we’re going to try to start in earnest on developing smaller saws next week. I guess it’s one of the most important steps.

August 14

We went to a techno concert in Miami last night. Christian, Mira, and Qiang, who keeps telling us to just call him Q like a James Bond character. He’s the one who wanted to go. He said we should enjoy ourselves. Mira was excited by the idea of going out before we started in earnest, she said it was going to kickstart the process for us.

I didn’t recognize a song for almost an hour. Just drums and bass. I asked Qiang if this was something he had in China and he laughed at me. “We have everything.”

Eventually they played a Janet Jackson song sped up and remixed. I knew it from driving around with the radio on and the hot wind blasting, bright sky up above. I teared up and had to turn away from Mira. We were all on a lot of ecstasy. I kept re-upping until I was bleary-eyed and almost drooling and Christian and Qiang took me outside to lay down on the gravel outside the warehouse. It was pitch black and we could barely see the stars.

“Back on our island we’ll see a whole canopy of supernova,” Christian told us.

I wanted to to tell him I looked forward to it, but I couldn’t move my lips. They were incredibly dry and my tongue stuck to the bottom of the my mouth like an earthworm trapped in dirt. I nodded. Qiang said I needed some water and gum. He was talking about the advanced surgical technology he worked on before being poached by C. I wanted to ask more, it sounded interesting, like something out of a science fiction novel, but he assured me he was just here to help double-check our work.

Eventually Mira came out to check on us. She asked me what was wrong and then made fun of me. She said she was always cleaning up after some sloppy white guy in a club. Apparently her ex was a doctor, a Czech who moved to the states in the nineties.

“He was a drunk though.”

“Tough,” I said—immediately realizing how awful of a thing that was to say. She smiled softly in the moonlight. I wanted to kiss her but she put her hand firmly on my shoulder and made sure I kept laying down. Then I blacked out. Woke up in a cold sweat and resolved to do less next time. We start soon.

August 15

Tomorrow. Officially.

August 18

Since we’ve started I’ve barely had time to write. We’ve started the mechanics of a prototype. Qiang keeps looking over my shoulder and telling me I have to work harder. I don’t know what to tell him. I’m doing my best. Besides, isn’t Christian my overlord? Apparently in October the major funder is coming to check in on us. XA Holdings. They mostly work on biotech. I can’t find anything out about them on the internet but it’s not like we have good dial-up out here. It’s the dawn of the new millennium and I can barely hold on to the outside world.

At least the computing power is good. I was able to check a few calculations, look at things on a screen. Mira’s in a different department. An entirely different project. Related, C tells us, but he won’t say more than that. Disappointing. I was hoping to see more of her. Two nights ago a few people drank on the beach and told dirty jokes. I didn’t join. Mira wasn’t there and Qiang went to bed early. He’s funny but disciplined. Doesn’t want to get too involved with the others after the night out. I get that. I hope we make some progress soon. I know it’s too early to be anxious. That doesn’t matter. I want to push through. Show them what I can do.

I thought about The Dybbuk last night. It was a play my grandpa read in Yiddish to me as a kid. He made me watch the movie too. A dead lover is possessed by the titular spirit. I don’t remember it very well. Maybe I should read it again, just to have something to unwind with. Reminder to ask C if we can get books here. I wonder what my grandpa would think of me now… My mom would be happy I was taking an interest. But she hated superstition. Thought G-d was love. I’m not so convinced. I think G-d is power, exactly like we’re doing. Wish these notes were more focused, more helpful. Too tired to show any calculations or work things out in this little black notebook. It’s only for emotions and reporting. Later I can go back and see how they effected me.

August 19

Heard a few people talking about the logistics of the Angel Disease. Foolish of me to think morality wouldn’t play a part in this. But they wondered who got it and why. If both humans and animals can get it—can it be based on something people did or did not do? Or is it truly random? I listened to the debate, it felt like hearing the rebbe talk about old midrasnhic arguments.

Who are we curing? Why? I suppose the thought is if it comes for one of us—that is, a human—it can come for any of us. There was a thought from one man that perhaps it infected people who had previous surgeries. Maybe they were weaker and more susceptible. Someone seemed to think that would make them more of a candidate to fix, because then their body was more fungible. Is that really true though? It seems like lore all the way down, madness commenting on madness.

August 20

2am- Made a minor breakthrough today. Can’t write in here, need to go back to the lab.

4:30am- Going to bed. Will try to write tomorrow.

August 22

Obviously I left it for a few days. What can I do but laugh? We did it. We figured out the specs of the saw, the technology to make it nearly infinitely small. Now we have to figure out the physics—how to get it to move in the way we need, to cut at the time we want it to. Mechanisms and movement. The two hard m’s. Qiang was helpful. We really got going after we figured it out, rechecking numbers and hashing it out, testing out theories on each other for what was to come. I think it was a major breakthrough after a minor one. Good sign.

August 23

Slow day. We presented our findings to C who had some doubts, but he was ultimately on board for a test run soon.

September 1

Well it was a bust. I should’ve known. We’re back to size again after thinking we knew how to do it. One good thing though, I’ve had more time to talk to Mira.

She came over to my hut a few nights ago, must have heard how badly we’d fucked it up. She wanted to talk about her work at first and then realized I was wincing. Wincing. I don’t know about that but that’s what she said. I told her I was fine. Besides it was good to hear about her research. She didn’t tell me anything real or important—just some vague stats, some equations she was working on with her team.

“I didn’t know you were the head of your team,” I said.

M laughed at me.

“You really are just a pretty face,” she said. “You haven’t done any recon have you? About the others?”

I said I didn’t know why I would. She dragged me out of the room by my hands, ending any possible flirtation and taking me out onto the beach. We made our way through the undergrowth into the moonlight. The sand was incredibly soft. I wasn’t expecting it. “Virginal,” M joked. I almost asked if she was but I thought better of it. Thank G-d I was sober.

“Were you raised religious?” I asked.

“A little. I read some of the Upanishads and Vedas when I was a kid. But my mom liked telling stories more. Things from the Ramayana or Mahabharata.”

“I’ve never read them,” I said.

She laughed. I liked making her laugh even if I didn’t know why.

“You don’t always have to reveal your ignorance.”

Nothing else happened that night. We went back to our own beds. I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. I thought about watching porn, but didn’t. Wondered if I could talk to C about calling someone onto the island but by the morning, drenched in cold sweat and guilt, I decided not to.

When I was really young—and I have no memory of this—my grandma tried to come and take me away from my mom. She said I was possessed by a dybbuk. That I was already acting like a psychopath. No one told me until I was eighteen. My mom let it slip late one night when she had a few too many glasses of wine. My dad wasn’t there for some reason. She clung to him like a shadow, but not then. Not when she told me.

September 5

We’ve been busy again. Keep hitting on something close to the right equation to keep everything together when it comes—but not quite. Just not quite. It’s incredibly frustrating. Qiang keeps telling me we’ll get there. Mira doesn’t say anything. Still won’t tell me what she’s working on. Christian says we should get something up and running before XA comes. He’s stressed. He’s not good at hiding it. I think that C would like to envision himself as a wizard, but he’s kind of a klutz. He falls, he stubs his toe, he doesn’t really seem to get the math as much as the rest of us. He’s supposed to be keeping us in check but when he comes over to look at our whiteboards he just nods and says “Good, good… keep going.” As if he doesn’t understand any of it. Don’t understand why they, whoever they are, would pick him to spearhead the whole thing. I’m not saying it should be me I just know I could do better. That’s the whole thing: even when I’m not firing on all cylinders I know that I’m better than the rest. Except M. I’m not sure what her deal is. She finally told me a little more about what she does but it doesn’t make sense in the greater scheme of things. She’s creating a chemical compound from horseshoe crab blood. I said there weren’t any horseshoe crabs around that I knew of. She smiled and took me to a little lagoon that was crawling with the little beasts.

“C thinks we can find another way to heal the infection.”

“Their blood?”

“Yes. We already use it in some medicine.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Hopefully you’ll never need it,” she said.

I hope she’s right. I hope the work we’re doing is all in vain.

September 14

We have a date now. October 3. Soon. XA will dock and we’ll show them what we’ve done with their investment.

October 2

They arrived this morning. A day ahead of schedule. I haven’t written because we’ve been too busy. We have a prototype. We think the equations work. Enough. I don’t think it will be as exact as the specs call for but I think the loss of blood will be minimal to the subject. We haven’t seen what they brought with them yet. A dog? A cow? A bat? I’m not sure. C knows. I’m sure of it. But he won’t tell us. Mira has been under wraps too. More like underwater. Every time I see her she’s furrowing her brow. I think she’s worried. But there’s a part of me that thinks if she can find a chemical solution we should focus on that instead. A nano-saw is… Not that I don’t think we can do it. We were just so far away at the beginning. There’s so many problems we don’t know we’ll encounter. I want to be optimistic. I am optimistic. We will deliver the project tomorrow.

October 3

Notes on Subject:

-A small dog. A terrier maybe? They say they have three infected subjects. We will test our work on each.

-The saw went in with almost no visible blood. Q says a good sign.

-The imaging shows a puncture in the lung caused by a growth. A thorn? Impossible.

-XA is represented by three men in suits. Silent. They watch the surgery closely. We manage to get the thorn removed from the lung and then go in to repair the pneumothorax. Dog dies in process. (I am not the surgeon. If I was, maybe the dog wouldn’t have died.)

Notes on Subject 2:

-A surprise. Another. A few hours later. This time a cow. A larger canvas.

-This time the cow was growing two wings out of its back. Again, impossible. This feels so Biblical. “The adversaries of the LORD shall be broken to pieces; against them he will thunder in heaven. The LORD will judge the ends of the earth.” We are weeping in his silence.

-Q looked over my shoulder so I’m starting a new page. Warning.

-Massive bleeding out. The wings have deeper roots than we thought from the scan. A thin, thin line down towards the cow’s heart. Massive rupture. Two surgeons going in.

-The cow almost lived, but at the last minute one of the two doctors nicked his heart.

“Let’s take a break.”

Notes on Final Subject:

-What the fuck

-No. No. Okay.

-C brought in his kid. A human subject.

-There’s so much blood. Something went wrong, somewhere in his skull something burst. Q is trying to help the on-call surgeon find the source of the bleeding. The two horns were connected to his brain stem somehow. We weren’t precise enough at all.

-Crimson just flowing from his eye sockets. Why?

-His eyes are hanging from two filaments, just dangling…

-C is crying. Yelling. Screaming. M is trying to calm him down, give him a sedative but he’s refusing.

-There’s nothing to be done. We failed this child. The tech isn’t ready and XA is going to withdraw. C is hysterical like a mother.

-God’s plan, C says a few hours later. We sit in silence.

***

After a few days of confused silence, Christian told the assembled team they would not be shutting down. He was going to start pouring in his own money. Levi didn’t know how to take it. He felt it was ridiculous for XA to withdraw in the first place. This was their pet project. Mira said she was out. She couldn’t stand it. Levi shot her a confused look that was meant to signal more than it ever possibly could.

            Project Nazareth was entering a new phase and no one knew if it would yield anything. Of course their leader wanted to make sense of the senseless. They all did. But mourning had to give way to something new and this felt like more of the same, a protracted recklessness rather than a rebirth. But that was what Christian said over and over as he ranted and raved. “Nothing has changed. The plan is the same,” he said. Mira left in the middle of the night, no goodbyes. Qiang kept stealing glances at Levi, the fearful furtive kind, like they were working for a mad scientist now rather than a controlled surgical expert. Levi always knew the end result of this was madness. At best, a new plague, at worst, death. Senseless ruptures and blood pouring out of eye sockets in front of them. The sheer volume of liquid had surprised him. He wasn’t a real surgeon, that was true, but it seemed excessive. There was something about the new attachments that was bizarre, to him at least, they were using their host’s blood supply. They changed things inside the body’s system. What exactly they were changing remained to be seen.

            Levi tried to keep his head down and work. He started drinking after work with Qiang. Whiskey, Miller High Life, whatever they got from the main island. They didn’t cross the water very often. Christian moped whenever they left and he wouldn’t go himself.

            As the months passed, Christian continued to debase himself. He was quiet. Never mentioned his kid. Complained about headaches. Started yelling at everyone to keep working, to push the project further. Even though XA had withdrawn he continued to find funding in strange places, a hodgepodge of new age weirdos, fringe scientists, and Cassadaga mediums. The rations the crew was given turned more and more simple. Some of the people Levi used to see around the island vanished overnight—presumably they quit without notice. He understood. It was a grim project. The birthplace of a new kind of death.

            Follow the chutes and ladders. Each week Levi thought he drew closer to the source of the equations that haunted his dreams. An ouroboros, he told Christian.

            “There’s no end and no beginning.”

            “It’s just math,” Christian snapped. “Figure it out.”

            They kept eating in silence for a while until Levi asked Christian what he thought was even doing.

            “You know,” he said. “For the cause.”

            “Are you not taking this seriously? Do you not see where this is going?”

            “I understand we’re fighting a disease, one that is imminent, yes. And we’re doing everything we can. But you’ve already driven at least three scientists away and your own child—”

“Don’t.”

            Qiang walked into the little lunchroom. He walked over and sat between them. Didn’t say a word, just made the space. They needed to know they were being watched, that civility still ruled.

A new countdown started. Just as soon as they’d gotten XA off their backs, Christian convinced them to come back to the island. A new trial by fire. A new crucifixion. The shadowy figures only gave two weeks notice, though apparently Christian had been begging them to come back for quite some time.

            Their leader had taken to posting little notices on their lab doors. He was rarely appearing in public anymore. When the mad scientist did, he berated them on their progress. Said they had to make up for lost time and lost bodies.

            Levi wanted to contact Mira. The loss of her body felt the most painful. The curves, the sweetness, her dusky gravel-filled voice. The timbre of it turned him on in retrospect. At night she was the one he thought of, not any of the sex workers he used to hire or ex-girlfriends. They all became one mush of pussy but his peer was different. He wanted to call her. Find her number somehow and tell her to come back, just for a visit. That was unlucky. She was probably right to leave when she did—Christian was only going to get worse. But he was going down with the ship too. This was an insane opportunity. One that would likely not recur. There was no one to tell really, no one would believe him. He hardly believed his own eyes. Mira would understand.

            The young egotist walked over to Qiang’s lab to check up on him. The visitation was happening in less than a week. Qiang was playing a Talking Heads CD and drinking a beer while eating some leftover noodles. The lead singer screamed and wailed about power lines as Levi sat down on a rickety chair.

            “How’s it going?”

            Qiang shrugged.

            “What?”

            “I’m worried about Christian. I don’t think this is a good idea.”

            “Sure but… isn’t it what he hired us for?”

            “Yes…” Qiang trailed off. “But still.”

            Flies buzzed around the small wooden hut. A lantern blinked above them. On a desk were dozens of notepads and books, journals and notations. Levi remembered how he’d kept a journal for a while too—until the death. Then it all seemed futile. Better not to remember.

            “I think we should get Mira to come back.”

            Qiang coughed up his noodles, somewhere between shock and laughter.

            “She’s not coming back.”

            “Why?”

            “The kid? Not to mention…”

            Levi arched an eyebrow, just enough to signal his interest.

            “You don’t know?”

            “I don’t know if I don’t know because you’re not saying anything yet.”

            “One of the other scientists… made advances.”

            A gut punch.

            “Did she say who…?”

            “Yeah,” Qiang said, “one of the other guys who left along with her. Ryan or something.”

            “Ryan,” Levi said, tasting the name in his mouth. “Fuck.” So it wasn’t him she was worried about. That was good at least.

            “I mean she was one of the two women here so… I guess something was bound to happen.”

            “Did she say what happened?”

            Qiang shook his head and took another slurp of his food.

            “Do you have a way to contact her?”

            “No. I don’t. I wish I did.”

            “Okay,” Levi said. “I’ll leave you to your meal in peace.”

            As he walked back through the brush, he heard a piercing cry. There wasn’t any large beast immediately around him but still he hurried back to the dwelling he called home for the past few months. Still, the cawing continued. A flock of angry birds. Something annoying but harmless. No weapon formed against me shall prosper and every tongue that rises against me in judgement shall be condemned.

He sent three messages the next morning. One to the rabbi, one to Mira, and one to the sex worker in Key West. Christian helped. He thought it was an incredible plan—if it worked.

            “You’re sure?”

            “Of course,” Levi said. “I always am.”

            “We have the capabilities, it’s just a matter of certainty.”

            “I can do it.”

            “You’re sure you have it nailed down…”

            “Yes.”

Cheerleaders lined the laboratory. His two weeks were up. Time for the big show. The nutty Kabbalah rabbi, Mira, and some girl alongside the esteemed members of XA. Christian was whispering to the scientists. No one was close enough to listen in. Qiang stood in position, waiting for the next step in the process. He’d followed along closely, had a dozen conversations with Levi but still worried the little stunt wouldn’t work. If they had multiple plans of attack, maybe, but Levi was hedging his bets on his new-found skill. He thought he was the Messiah, God’s gift to the experimental medical community.

            Levi entered with the first test subject.

            “Redux time,” Qiang said under his breath.

            Christian shot him a look as if to say that was in poor taste, and it was. He knew that. But so was all of this. They should’ve just gone home. Something about the way Levi had talked last night, his voice racing over every word like he was on speed. But they knew each other, this was just what he was like when he got excited. When he thought he was conquering death. Grim to realize that, to remember what they were doing, Qiang thought. Trying to stop the reaper’s quiet wrath.

            Levi was decked out in a surgical gown and slim white mask. A black cap over his small head, wielding protractors.

            “Hello everyone,” he started. “Don’t worry, we have two surgeons on hand. But this isn’t all for show.” Mira looked nervous. He looked her in the eyes as he talked. It didn’t take that much money to get the three of them in the room, but he was going to enjoy his money’s worth. The rabbi and the girl looked skittish. They wouldn’t meet his eye. Probably thought he was mad. He was. “I will be performing the surgery,” he said, gazing down at the rabbit on the operating table. “It’s important I think we acknowledge why we failed last time. It should’ve been one of us up here operating the nano-saw we made, not one of the surgeons. In a way,” he laughed, “I am the one true surgeon. The inventor. It’s harder to work something after being taught secondhand. Of course, if something goes wrong, they’ll step in. We also won’t be operating on a child.” He knew that he had to appeal to his shareholders if he wanted to usurp Christian’s place in the company. To be Christian he had to be a believer. Calm, collected, cool, charismatic. The last part was the hardest. Levi was a natural asshole. Even he knew, at least when he was lucid.

            The first surgery began. This time it went off without a hitch. Almost no blood at all. Just the tiniest dribble of crimson left on table. It took just a few minutes. Everyone clapped. It was a quick show, almost a trick of the light. Everyone had been very careful. There could be no mistakes, so there weren’t. Levi smiled behind his mask.

            “How,” one of the men from XA asked, “did you get ahold of specimen with the Angel Disease?”

            “Great question. Christian? Do you want to field this one or should I?”

            Christina was shaking as he stammered out something about variants.

            “You may know that there are variants. If you don’t, you will soon,” Levi took over. It was strange, this confidence coursing through his body. “Christian has some side experiments. Things he told me about after you left. One of them is a little… a little zoo. Where he tests how contagious the Angel Disease, or Diseases, really are. We know less than we think. It seems to be something akin to the common cold. We don’t know exactly how it spreads but it does. Not everyone around will get it, but almost like it’s hereditary, it mutates those around it. Inspires similar growth. Human evolution gone cancerous. Maladaptive.”

            Mira nodded at him. He moved on.

            “So when the previous subjects were here, Christian put them in the zoo. These new subjects resulted from the contamination.”

            “So we could all be… infected?” Qiang said.

            “Unlikely. It rarely jumps to humans.”

            “But it did,” the man from XA said. “Last time we were here there was… a human subject.”

            “Yes,” Levi replied. “It’s horrible. But that child wasn’t so far gone. We could’ve… if the nano tech was where it is now, we might… might have been able to save him.” Christian was hysterical now. They couldn’t meet each other’s eyes.

            “We won’t be practicing on a kid,” Levi said, “but Christian has brought me what we needed to work on the most. Someone who has been completely taken over by the Angel Disease.”

            “Excuse me?” The man scoffed.

            “Please,” Levi said to the surgeons.

            “Levi?” Qiang said. “What is this?”

            “I didn’t want to implicate you.”

            “Where the fuck is this zoo?” Mira said, coming over now, frightened by the possibility of escalating nefarious deeds.

            “Downstairs. Just below us,” Levi replied. “Can we clear Christian?”

            “You mean… take him outside?” Qiang asked.

            “Yes.”

            “Sure, I’ll do it.”

            Once they were outside, the surgeons brought in something nearly indescribable.

            “Our angel,” Levi said.

            No one else saw salvation. They saw terror. It stomped in on two feet, wings bursting out of scabby pink skin. Dirt and grime all over its hide, horns and warts and boils. Like something out of a Medieval plague.

            “What the fuck…” Thalia said. “Why the hell did you bring us here? To see this?”

            “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “We will do what we can to save the beast. This was once a pig. A little one that ran around—that’s what Christian told me anyway.” Levi was going to show them he could kill a messenger of God’s wrath. He was the Tzadik. He had come.

            The surgeons used chains to lug the daemon to the table where they used tranquilizers, struggling to penetrate its horn-covered hide. The steely scales wouldn’t allow for most needles. Special-order. All thanks to Christian before his lunacy devolved.

            Once the creature slumbered, Levi stepped up and touched two of the nano-saws, so small no one could even see them. He walked back over to a little control panel with a camera. That was the whole point, part of what had gone wrong before—the camera’s accuracy lagged, the curvature of the saw was off. Too many mistakes, too many things getting nicked that shouldn’t have. It’s a delicate area after all.

            Everyone watched the saw winding through the organs of the pig-creature. The rabbi got up as if to leave but Levi stopped to give him a look.

            “Pay attention,” the man from XA yelled.

            Levi smiled like a ghoul and got back to work. There was no point of course. This thing was too far gone, transmogrified into a pustule of puss and thorn. But he cut the horns out from the nervous system—or at least a few of them. They’d spread all over, changed the pig’s natural DNA.

            When he finally stopped and looked at his small crowd, they were astonished. He almost bowed. Then he turned around, whipped out a bigger surgical saw and started hacking off the wings. Whole. Blood poured out, the nodules were little horns connected to the very fungal-looking wings. They were limbs. Useless. Couldn’t do anything. The stench was awful. Everyone gasped. Mira and Thalia walked out. The rabbi grimaced. But the man from XA was pleased. When Levi brought a portion of the wing over to him, he took it.

            “I think the infection continues to mutate. Wings are its natural end point. That’s why you call it the angel disease, isn’t it? Well. I found a way to stop it. If we catch it early enough.”

            “Yes,” the man said. “You did.”

            Levi locked eyes with the rabbi. The old man stopped in front of the young one. The idealist waited for a compliment, to have proven the mage wrong. Instead, he spit in Levi’s face and walked off without saying a word. Such hostility. When the judgement came, he would not be lenient to the elite. Pay day had to come eventually.

∩

Grace Byron is a writer from the Midwest based in Queens. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Granta, The Paris Review, GQ, The Nation, The New Republic, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue, among other outlets. Find her @emotrophywife. Herculine is her debut novel.

Speaking Into a World that We Will Eventually Not Inhabit: On Christian Wessels’ Who Follow the Gleam

Christian Wessels, Who Follow the Gleam, University of Massachusetts Press, April 2026, 108 Pages

The potent moments in Christian Wessels’ debut book of poems Who Follow the Gleam, to me, are the ones that feel like the speaker has morphed into a future, past, or radically other form of himself right before our eyes. “Sympathetic Magic from the Black Forest,” the first poem in the collection, stakes its claim on disorienting rearrangements of repeated units: 

Because every green cloud has a season,
every untouched pool, a spell
for the untouched season, because every

Season has a green spell, untouched
by daylight 

This passage adopts elements of chiasmus to heighten the sense of a priori logic to the opening spell. The statement about the green cloud is presented as the pre-supposition for a resulting statement. Such a statement is delayed indefinitely. Rather than fulfilling the premise of the because-statement, Wessels generates the feeling of rhetorical order through chiasmus, which also allows me to sit with limitless extension rather than itching for resolution. As the poem’s title suggests, the logical feeling that stems from the chiasmic reversal of the sentences is a little mesmerizing. It asserts its own power by invoking a memorable structure. 

Sympathetic magic is magic that’s performed on a proxy object like a voodoo doll. Throughout Who Follow the Gleam, the speaker undergoes many proxy-fications. In “Sympathetic Magic,” the speaker perceives his own spirit outside of himself after having difficulty breathing in the forest. The doubling is disturbing, but it also points to the heightened stakes of language as a site that proves our interrelation. Later:

When I bruise my arm, apologies,
your arm is bruised.

This voice is an imitation of me, body and voice
When I speak your mouth moves

It may be our mouths that move in response to the speaker’s words as we read. It may be the speaker’s uncanny double, risen out of the ramblings of an oak. It may also be one of the many addressees who populate the speaker’s world. The poem’s transmission from the page to our bodies may not be that different from language’s traversal from the world of the dead back to us. Death is a surface or screen across which projections and doublings occur, and the thickness at the center of the chiasmic structure feels like an apt representation of that screen as well.

The death screen/mirror reflects the speaker’s sense that he is speaking into a world that he will eventually not inhabit, even as he channels and communicates with poets who have passed from this realm. A ghostly way of inhabiting the present might be one way to characterize the paradox of writing. Wessels’ way in Who Follow the Gleam is attentive to potential for revivification in the remnants of the past that we encounter in this life. In “Our Snail,” he translates a family member’s retelling of a long bedtime story about an anthropomorphic snail that her father improvised and reiterates the tension at the heart of storytelling itself. “We needed our snail to make it to Leipzig” the speaker remembers, but as the story goes on, she discovers that the fairy tale could not satisfy her desire and be accurate:

‘The snail never left
and neither did the people, that’s how
our town began, with that crowd . . .’ By that
point in the story we knew he had lied,
or at least imagined that parts of our shared life
were not true. . .’

And as the poem concludes, the speaker remembers her father:

‘we listened to our father
improvise. He sang in the church choir.
He never spoke about refining gold.’

The work of refining gold (which by now sounds a little magical on its own) is a version of the story that the father did not see as a story, in the same sense that poets might overlook the here and now in search of a poem or story that could satisfy an elevated, yet inchoate, desire. Though there are often voices from the annals of history here, the poems manage to find enchantment in the contemporary domestic reality of delivery errors, potty-training, and yardwork. “These modern notes/ and tones were stolen/ eons ago,” Wessels notes, and it is clear as he ferries language from various points in time, the tones come from somewhere beyond the chronological demarcations that separate our sense of the modern from the classical. The feeling of enchantment is not delimited by history or our unfamiliarity, and that is a remarkable achievement across Who Follow the Gleam.

∩

Tobi Kassim’s writing has been published in The Volta, Chicago Review, The Rumpus, The Kenyon Review, Best New Poets, Chicago Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by Undocupoets, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and Cave Canem. His chapbook Dear Sly Stone was published by Spiral Editions.

Three Poems

Numbers

My eyes are wet with faith today.
My eyes are wet with lizard pee
and faith. And faith falls like hard rain
through the clouds of my language.
And faith falls down like lizards peeing
through the hard rain of my days.
It’s like my days are what I’m faithful in,
and I’m the rain that’s falling hard
through language, through the grass
that grows on God, or the grass
that grows like language on
the rain inside my eyes—
which we both know is lizards
peeing. Which we both know is faith.

Vitamin Face

His cause of death was “envelopes.”
His ghost looked nothing like him.
His hands were full of loose-leaf tea.
Blood on the riverbanks, blood on the oceans.
There were tire marks inside his brain.
His office was painted a glandular yellow.
He liked to eat “gorilla dust.”
Blood on the barbecue, blood on the fuses.
He was bald as the blue August sun.
He only listened to music in April.
He knew I would not miss him.
Blood on the garden gnomes, blood on the moss.

I Am a Dentist

I eat teeth.
If I am dating you,
it is because I want your teeth
near me at all hours.
My bed is like
one of those racecar beds
that children have
except mine’s
shaped like teeth.
I am fabulously wealthy.
My wallet leaves
bite marks on my butt.
I have many dark tattoos
of historically-significant
molars. Yes…
Come over to my mansion.
It smells like health insurance.
We’ll have dinner.
Bring your teeth.

∩

Lloyd Wallace runs Poetry Nightly. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Annulet, the Cleveland Review of Books, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Pittsburgh. You can read more at lloydwallace.com.

Four Poems

The End of the Long Streams

east branch

Call it Superfund Quay or Arbitration Inlet
names are remorse’s ornaments
the science fiction to demonology pipeline
watchwords at the end of a long dissolution
Still these symbols work their shame
the old fashioned way: through dream
Little Dresden and Dimes Square
disgrace chases a strange endocrinology which chases
the Golden Ratio which chases the bed
installed so hopefully in the cosmopolis
Two feet are no match for a fractal coast: wrong

english kills

Flowering tree entelechy or on this planet spring
The hillside heavy with mausoleums drops
down to the embankments and pocket parks
Paulownia trees twist up from
the glue boom’s imperial runoff
Aftermath ecologies traffic their catalogs
of generative affliction the same way
people have for generations: to give description
something to do
A fine mist of prallethrin over the inlet
You choose grief: you have a fondness for buzzwords 

whale creek

Across the water is Bristol Basin’s ballast palisade
The microphalluses of Hercules
After the Blitz bits of the city were made
to weigh down the Allies’ ships
The empire’s unwavering will to expand still
made a Little Bristol: another decoy city milled
into the excurrent middenly: are middens good?
Do they symbolize nascent abuse?
Or do they show us innocence: beaver dam alluvion
Decoy and reversal: their anagram camouflage
fools the cycle into restoring one fate to the next

the turning basin

So what do some conchologists do? Precision syringe squirt
the ideogram for profusion on my schism-soiled apron
That shall be the primeval forest you start from scratch
But first one more punishing flight of metacognition
The Fire Island salt holly drinks from a freshwater lens
Wallace’s Night Heron: wobbly juvenile: its archival aliveness
from Nightsoil Wharf: Cologne Gulch: so you say: Jim Cantore
our bard of disaster: it’s time to mash the lanternflies into
a sweet-smelling paste: this truly is the Irradiated Riviera
and here just above the high filth mark it will be a dragonhoard’s
tidy nativity scene that changes the nature of osmosis

∩

Peter Milne Greiner is from Otis, Massachusetts. He works on Governors Island. 

Three Poems

[The emblem of society was called ‘conscience’]

The triumph of the nick is the unconscious fantasy
    of those who scratch

a blandness of dinner in Herr Heimlich’s studio
    restructures his genome

since my purpose is to partake in legacies of thought
    how dreary should the derby

this dissolving writ should be like a bald eagle
    with ketchup on its talons

a spotless glass tumbler in the blink of an eye
    between the nothing before and after

begin again: Would you die to satisfy yourself
    in some verifiably perfect literature

an inner England scrumming like a fraternity of indents
    tripping over themselves to outrun stupidity

a stochastic twang, echoing in the toilet bowl
    of world literature; sunspots on stippled hands

for a while, I thought this vision a mermaid, a fragment
    so obscure—the breathwork of uncle junk

bracketing an inner racetrack with a jungle gym
    at its center, a pressure cooker called succor 

*

I thought, taking the perspective of nature
    there’s nothing objectively wrong with plagiarism

then was lanced, scalded, and buried
    half-alive with my twin, a bisque figurine

aside from the family romance, I was a brother
    in other respects: That is, no man, but chickenshit

unceremoniously promoted to the status of guy
    a Daruma doll in a bentgrass school

how is a solidly built Anglican like toiling
    in a world map of unfilled stars

marching in wool shorts toward abandonment
    and belly scritches, bewildered

promoting the works of one who said, “The sky is
    falling,” begetting a circumstance

dubbed believing one’s own two eyes, who later
    dragged a filthy Swiffer in Albuquerque

heroism is an import from thinking—what started
    as an amusement metastasized

what was then called an innocent gaiety
    takes the social form of authentic narration

kisses: We once thought them fortifications
    in our stand against the caprices of time 

*

Thought their sentience unflagging; wanted
    our innermost names beaten clean out of us

but this is prosaic—a letter dictated by a bourgeois
    nonentity with unclear seriousness

a fold dividing astrology and psychology
    on which werewolf graffiti dangles

and up which the memories of babelike jarheads
    have hoisted irrational naval colors

she called them glamours, the duplicities
   of the psyche, but could identify no tradition

from which the name had arisen. I wished
    to gain wisdom from recitation but found there only mind

whining highly, dim as a bulb in a broom closet
    until it was time to stand and applaud

we begin as gluttonous swine, and end, if we’re lucky
   guitar picks in a junkshop dish

we begin as crosshairs and end, if we’re lucky
    overlapping fabric straps forming the seat of a chair

[Fisherman and shepherds]

String a line between two cans and let the language trot
  out a ubiquity mussed by demolition solvents

that’s that vertigo I felt when we got truly lost for the first time
  near the beginning of the ropes course in the dark

wood next to the PepsiCo campus . . . it was more extensive
  than I had imagined and also more haunting, and less barren

a certain Dan in our group had just come from church
  and took it upon himself to lead a kind of demonstration

there was wetness on the black stumps; a hush was filled
  with the drilling of a chipping sparrow, an adolescent male

exhibitionist, being one who was secretly never housebroken
  a survivor of too many nights in the life of asbestos

an expression of life shot vertically from a canon
  whose parabola basically describes the trajectory of public favor

such was the sutra of that demonstrative bird, and this
  is the last thing I’ll say about it: If you get a chance

to press your face into the feathers of a chipping sparrow
  smell its discontinuity with description, especially

this one, so senseless I should probably strike it
    from the sense record before it becomes my writing 

*

I have moved to preserve the integrity of a chair
  when I could not preserve integrity of my own life

there would be a respectable inefficiency, renaming every iota
  of experience “windfall number x,” etc., a trophy wanting

that might set the stage for a personal revolution, or at least
  provoke the destruction of a few street signs last night

here, I should pause to add that in a quest for renewal
  we are permanent beginners; our stories become hinterlands

in which lost boys, repressed, but roaming ahead,
  bowl over a fastidious man in a hat, winding him

there he dances, there he dreams, reposes, and also blinks
  urinates frequently, and flinches when another dog barks

Regret is this man’s name. He once planned to race, fast as hell
  to every outpost in need of a detective

but let’s unzip the stanzas under which he camps
  that he monitors for holes in case of rain

I like to tramp in his little main area, a ragged yard
  where it smells of filth, and in my memory a red Kong bounces

in my tramping, I am like that man; though I am not that man
  we are similar mainly in our thinking, deeds, and attire 

*

I am less fond of his other area
  where a furious wind whips the tombs of his exes

in theory, one can kick back there and unwind without fear
  of starring in any clip or seeing one’s name in print

one placard reads “Tess,” and who was that? A bomb
  threat who reorganized pleasure on the level of possibility

before steady work held any appeal, Amsterdam was their only plan
  —he looks back now and wishes to descry its allure

damn! he really does—but that wish is only a common disease
  one must treat with an herb like calendula

then stifle to death with an ode, then kick and kick, even after
  it has already been kicked to death twice today

I just want you to remember with me the exsanguination of desire
  that always follows a good roll in the mud

walk through our ages with me, as in a crazy timelapse. Gaze
    on our aging while nibbling popcorn and feeling silly

for outsourcing the proper experience of aging to a machine,
    a narrative machine, in this case an idea

borrowed from the technology of cinema; then make the animal image
    of dotage, a naked head inscribed with certain immutable laws

[The crippling involution of ‘nature’]

Through many enervating nights I’ve turned my camera on,
  often after a helping of sherbet and a round of tangrams

light is beginning. It is beginning to dabble in foundering
  Light has its seven irredeemable faults, Rebecca

brings water to a simmer. And what comes after
  in the teleological narrative of water, heat, and time

happens after nightfall, in defunct train yards
  beyond the yards shown on government maps

where you sight a mole person’s last graffito, a message
  lost to sun and air, but this sober tag still functions

being a bug in the student portal where a tuft of hair
  might grow, a catkin on one branch of atrophy

in summer, when the Irish gap years clump
  on balconies, make blood pacts on San Pablo

and even in winter, when school was supplanted
  by the tempo of shooting stars zipping up the mild sky

we must study the gravesites that are our first impetus
  for denial, from which Western culture gains particulars

we must steep in the gardens of Palestine, especially after
   night has fallen, and wail in key of the living 

*

Chugging rivers of Constant Comment furtively
  so as to mitigate the effects of last night’s bender hopefully

gathering information from a muddy puddle that reflects
  my self-images, each of which comes apart so easily

Sunday in the downhill race—my heteronomy lags
  behind my neighbor’s, whose morals forbid learning

then his tensile rigging suggests a dungeon below
  learning, where the distant cries of fallen warriors undergo

archival mitosis, their long journey toward mewling analogous
  to the homing of vampire fangs toward a fair neck

really, it was a best practice developed in a feeling mode
  by starlight beings who mostly dwell in a whirring spacecraft

they wear their lowland pelerines like ordained killers
  of peasants used to do; their laughter shakes their toes

there is a simple logic to the address of their distant bosses
  it amounts to a tender letter to every fallen intellect

I did not know how our own suburb in time stirred
  your memory, arousing your hate like a low fog over a lawn 

*

Most of what I imagine is gleaned
    from an urban legend with its seed

in an old war song, a festive song
    the fruit of a commoner

is spontaneous mutations
    of balladry, that common

 source that is like a salt lick
    —bitter, enduring, almost nutritional

raunchy—one can’t predict that
   exchange: Endless hammering

 in the street for pure melody
   one hangs tight, receptively

like a monarch touching down in a bar
    his wings broadcast a midlife crisis

then, “splat!”—some punk
    asserts the natural order

the diorama we look to
    for entertainment

sick me on these beers, that I might
    remember to never go home

so long as exultation
    can still take over from me

that high arrives to help us both
    stomach a night of self-immolation

at the end of which, dawn
   will be shot, stuffed, and mounted

beers, help me forget the real war
   is not logomachy—

though the integrity of each stable
    dialectic, especially self and state

depends on its virtual battles
    mind being a march from “I was”

a proposition of solidity
    across a beating “I am”

through military
   ashes “I will be”

then a single tulip raised up
   like a blood blister

on the barren season
    —all around

the air raised up a searing falsetto
    from a prior stillness

∩

Parker Menzimer is the author of the chapbooks Aion’s Ribbon (Inpatient Press) and The Links (1080press). With Maxwell Paparella, he is co-author of Towpath to the Interior (The Double Tied Press), a braided cinquain diary. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in A Public Space, Annulet, Prelude, Tagvverk, Works & Days, Second Factory, and elsewhere. His writing has received support from the Truman Capote Literary Trust and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He serves as Public Programs Director at the Poetry Society of America and, with Terrence Arjoon, coedits the print magazine poetry2.

One Poem

from Mountainscapes

[squander nightfall abandoned...]

squander nightfall abandoned to snow whirl

reversing grave leveled city, vista cynic nominates near trim

drone observed position, picking out circling star light

refused, left the gaps to air in silences, routine turn flotilla

gift of forgetting each immediate sensation

as caustic notes, chemical fields clamber again up rough vocab:

unify or organize drawing back to the ascent, animal body rote

walk down street routine at quote dawn, trained on reference

not giving enough: planar basis for what it would mean to accumulate or forget

left to the eroding wash, current flows down this street in crisis,

formed without vision, thought pacing that spans rests,

trilogy of dying, rapt to curtain mind

while in these nearness gaps fruit unexplained phenomena,

docile thighs, delight delimits aging surface, root tensions

surface spoiled in rippling figments of attention

consequent militancy glares not historic from that gaze of skull’s capacity

nightmare thought of the reserved bullet, poems pending placid

rippled disturbed back in time of collapsible torment, gap in thought

defers pending atrocity, each with what gives own grave diggers

perception caught light between blades of grass, between scorched concrete

schema spying near desolate, that murmur in my activity and struggle

borne as intensity left at depth, gardens of humor

running tangent, turned plaintive call to neoprene veer

sharpening waste excreted poet solvent, salivating recession

dingy, diminutive, debited: nothing that continues over the length of wave,

of pulse, acrid and distant fumes, dissipating, searching from the middle

flesh and verb, not about food, to be food,

need void resource blanked out moment of life,

ground zero consuming bloom

read for outside, then sectioned, urged to extend

shipping networks, corridors, embargoes equal blockades

warfare via limits to calories, weapons of pure extractive desires

referencing empire so need to draw it out,

a long sequence: arterial sentence, vein glib depth oxygenate

spent a few days home exhausted from work, not separated

transport and my labor and this accumulation

fed and bloodless, though pulse affirms outer realms of mind

not anarchy, crows over buildings,

freighter into hurricane to shove off time, recording

transcript repeats “noise”, no light to last moments

rendered as sound, grieving image

rapid eye movement: stall this pace / pulse

normal remembering death’s vast blank, encouraging one

to be acquainted with darkness, parasympathetic system responding

to the dark, pulse slows in flickering dots

not there bodies sparking not image but the complete and total

center overwhelm

nothing nothing as near to a new rapturous aural open

agony line-by-line left breathing open palm to coax wavy surface

leading means accumulated plink plink of thought surface under

the bubbles, charge running along rare earth metals, I attempt

to visualize route of extraction, invisible circuits surging across ocean

value is in speed, warped steel short fracture driving

two songs against each other, into the mistake that is this velocity

little space for breath, for understanding edge, writ limit

divulging spelled divot, wanting not to follow dot dot lines

left turn, coast view rotates around me, memory meaningful

food in course of this, or food prices, stuffed classes starve themselves

as body control, asymptotic arc, things they feel are theirs

possessed by calamities they ensue, raging at them each fracture

they press there with us in the pulse we wield

in space line noise drip follows instead clarity prosaic mistake

imprison mantle, draping paths round road cord surge

protecting identify pleased within communal circle, clasp struggle

near ideas stop and start, FPS feed, flickering image as read

belief bread give flicker hand gesture, crossing century

sorry for mind map, anger molecular fuse, wind and pavement

weather ambient engine drone, collapsing angles of sight and sound

waiting at the harbor, unceasing food obligations merits supply

not that I caught freeze or my labor, urgent call

militant dispersal obedient, open Joan of Arc,

germ of agriculture

winter clear beats dear message to me plopped aura

where you read gummed and situation

halt stigma placid undercurrent

you take active as greed form

super majority warm broth

left to memory, intonation blocks extending era future fusion

heart of if blank stand-in leverage gales burst stationary

render or accumulate or gather in the inner shadow of pulse

of repeating the station and street of devastation, depopulated

garner grim calculated walk pace, stopped before glowing

stationary explication, dulled motivation,

sprung practice after thought

you build opal resource gathering impart

left of impact site, sorry for the trash that lingers

direct, pulling in the ask, the scattered and uncomfortable

edge of such awareness, more than forward

open floral mind given those you bring and belong

clarity’s mistake, dense awareness entering an open space

between buildings, register caution and watch for reflections in windows

quote “civilizing mission” relays brutality, open effort gains currency

peace harrow tunneling workers given sacrifice leads

heart need, opens again, under soil: subterranean clear focus not

sound space, waiting in dark, as prep for the death we give

light in oppose, never left to bend, shadow falling along this rock

shadow extends outer expectation florid, waiting to emerge

known cresting silence, three points angle in people’s judgment

cosmic green reed surround participating swamp static

cause is caught in struggle vocab, dream light through reeds

stationary property meant hearing within confused gray wash

rainbow stolen “civilizing” circuit horror

vendor shipment loop

built with these hands, working under bass pulse, status

music, folds finance, back waiting at treeline, pulled

into future violence, observance, after sitting with people talking

about what? creases here, rows in fields, canopy, waits in sun

dry aura winter flow, dry pool winter, careening between

the space you want to hold over us over renewed

beat, clear sense of need and how to hold onto it through

tidal wash, dipping under the surface of dream

sublimate value, what I wanted then for others, line of the shore

rising form line left, on the wash of desert hiss, closed

taken as touch, field in nuance

parade bargain, roads that merit

a graven melody in backwards, rustling undergrowth motion

paces walking went through own practice, dialogue back to mind

reverses format, serrated thought running along pavement

these structures, built or for bad hoard,

clamped on noise

to themselves in or for darkness, spirit basis and currency

benefit of system stowed in speech barreling forward

road forecasts emptied nothing reaper on a still nest

cast commodity over living current

urged instant stellar

spoken thrice, figure along stretch of road flickering light

muted non-metallic vivid overtones, went bird cloud

turn in breeze, image by mass of cars

spoke to people

stall, gather ambient, roar of echo,

buildings turning sound back to us

mass scene descends, wide view, moving in fear repeats form

massacre, its a ton or brown exceeding the gray over the scene, men

blue vigilant passage we follow, led under root and dirt

please communal repeats ends, graft breaks fictional light,

scorching light under a rose abrasion, circulating cold,

asked frequencies, aura equals thrum without a pulse

left abstract, dodging ruin, all of this west from theft

left to anger, priestly, descending on celebrating mass

left to the twelve, circulate red, frame as crane

bringing vision downward

falling away from eyes, where you see no meaning or difficulty

systematize glandular focus: memory eroding built streaming future

let it continue along what the film stops or starts

∩

Geoffrey Olsen is the author of Nerves Between Song (Beautiful Days Press 2024), and many chapbooks, most recently Neck Field (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs 2025) and In Sleep the Searing (New Mundo 2025). He lives in Brooklyn.

One Poem

∩

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

Two Poems

from “!Scrap Of!”

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

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

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

ON TUESDAY 

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

∩

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

One Story

Hombre de burro

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

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

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

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

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

‍ ‍I think we should divorce.

‍ ‍Yeah. Well… yeah.

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

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

“How?”

“Divorcio.”

“I like that.”

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

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

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

“Just some guy.”

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

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

“Hablamos.”

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

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

“It’s getting hot,” she said.

“It’s Mexico. It’s always been hot.”

“Fuck off.”

“Let’s go to the pool.”

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

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

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

She said, “Do you guys speak Spanish?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s an agave distillate,” she said.

“Okay?”

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

“It tastes like cum,” he said.

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

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

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

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes I do.”

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

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

“I mean,” Laura said.

“Because you know what it sounds like?”

“What,” Laura said.

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

“Say it,” Phoebe said.

“They were trying to fuck you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Quince?” he asked. “Fifteen?”

The young man nodded.

“To see donkey man?”

“Si, Hombre de Burro. Muy famoso.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

He did as he was told.

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

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

“Yes,” Hombre de Burro said.

He nodded.

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

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

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

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

“But you didn’t,” he said.

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

“Who?”

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

“And so you sewed it on?”

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

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

“Of course.”

He nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are they?”

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

“It’s difficult to say.”

“Of course it is.”

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

“And what happened?”

“They ended.”

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

“Fuck.”

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

“Which one is the happy one?”

“The one with the love. Obviously.”

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

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

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

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

“Okay enough.”

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

“I said enough. I believe you.”

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

“What are you seeing?” he asked.

“Your death.”

“Christ, nevermind.”

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

“What kind?”

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

“Incredible.”

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

“I won’t kill myself.”

“You don’t know. You never know.”

“I realize that.”

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

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

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

“Right.”

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

“Gracias.”

“Of course.”

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

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

“And do what? How would we live?”

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

“Of course.”

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

“Foolproof.”

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

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

“Why are you telling me this?”

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

“Oh.”

“I just thought you should know.”

∩

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

Five Poems

CERTAIN SILENCE,

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

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

EACH CREAK

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

TWO OTHER

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

BEECH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

∩

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

Three Poems

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

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

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

∩

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

One Poem

Autobiography

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

∩

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

One Story

Invisible Theater

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

∩

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

One Poem

Portrait of a Lake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

∩

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

from Correspondence

TATTER BALLAD
TAM LIN B

your tongue 

   .        .           .           .           .           .

                          double rose,
    rose but only

                                kill

10/18

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

Those are not good photographs. ☐

1/12

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

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

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

THE TWA SISTERS

   father

   dragged
And stripped her

                father                                  
        made a harp o her    

12/26 

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

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

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

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

on the man and his guitar. ☐

DIVES AND LAZARUS

    Bestow upon the poor

hunger

 art
   lies

         hunger

art
lies

10/25

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1/14

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

but the tree is just

menacing and undestructive
yet. his intention is to diminish

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

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

4/17

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

[Quoted text hidden]

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

online commerce. ☐

THE CARNAL AND THE CRANE

   argument
             Carnal

Was     the mother of
                   the                    Ghost

1/26

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

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

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

∩

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

Four Poems

∩

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

Three Poems

Eyes Pouring, Washing Cheek

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

Wake Up and Smell the Malabar Chestnut

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

In a Beautiful Place Feeling Sad

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

∩

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

One Poem

Grisaille

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

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

The ache arranges itself
like furniture in a dark room 

The divine thing gleaming
just there
just 

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

∩

M. Elizabeth Scott is based in Glasgow.

Four Poems

from A Season

⬥

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⬥

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⬥

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

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

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

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

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

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

Married in a sharp high wind.

⬥

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thirst the story is
From end to end a natural home

A life-dream crossed with blood
And extra light

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

Split of flower and fruit
Of summer and strange spring.

∩

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

Three Poems

Facts

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

Facts

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

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

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

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

Facts

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

∩

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