Category: Poetry
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Homegrown Daughters
daughters imported from afar and grown in monocultures, like bananas or oranges, start to attract fruit flies in August. real daughters should be grown in a terracotta pot from seed or else they resist root training. my girls are easy-peelers, their pith falls away from the flesh in ribbons. the windowsill overflows with their variegated…
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Blake’s Wilderness
Call it rehumanization that reabsorbs what was separated out. In this reunification the horrific becomes beatific; tygers and lions “sing, they seize the instruments of harmony” (FZ 124.17). Remetamorph, “further up and in,” as C.S. Lewis says in The Last Battle, reads like a salmon migration upstream, out of division into unity and not to…
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Jenny Holzer’s Instagram
At the top of a staircase in the Tate Modern, one of the walls is covered in bright colours and contradictory texts. Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays (1979-82), plastered across this wall, serves as a sort of introduction to the rooms just along the corridor that house a selection of some of Holzer’s most well-known work.…
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An Interview with Writer Ron Riekki Using the Questions of physicsforums.com’s interview with Astrophysicist Adam Becker
Q: Give us some background on how you got interested in physics and some experiences in youth/school that were formative. RR: I don’t really have “interest” in physics. I mean, there’s gravity and stuff, but I don’t know about them. I mean, not like physicists would know and stuff like that. But in high school,…
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Self Portrait with Modern Man
“In line for a number but you don’t understand.” Arcade Fire act one: we wake once again with opposable thumbsfumble with the pickets and prescriptive linesrearrange the display for passers-bywho are too dumb or too drunk on necessitywe’re given a gift but we’re wasted, so we waste it act two: we look in the mirror…
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Cure for the Common Equation
I swallowed heaping teaspoonsof forgets-where-it-has-beenand stacked little orange bottles fullof does-not-know-where-it-is-goingon the grey marbled kitchen counterfor tomorrow. Neither were expected to have an affecton my current conditionwhich I was certain had no earthy cure.The mind is a well oiled,finely tuned machinedesigned to want to solve for X. Solutions require removing variables.Hence these two.These tooare being…
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Concourse B
I stare down a mirrored polished hallfrom a seat at gate 25 in Concourse B—space that harbors all the emptiness of blank paper.My eyes close around a thought as the mind rewinds.There was a crack in the pavementI tripped on once. The sidewalk goes onand on and we walk side by side or alone. There…
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like Walter Benjamin
For Freddie Like a luteTouched by a breath of airAnd it sings on its ownWrote Walter Benjamin. Like a breath of airTouched by a luteAnd it sings on its ownI write. Like peopleBereft of airStrangled by stringsWho touch themselves. Like thoseWho are no more.And they touch us.And we sing. Like Walter Benjamin. Translated from Hebrew…
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regret at 3am
a basin and runningwater aren’t enough thisshame requires a vaccinean exorcism ofthe spirit who’s spirit?mine? steam billows expands fillsme engulfing me choking mebristles scratching like a gamblerpleading desperatelypining the winning hand echoes play on repeata mind rolls in trancea body in motionvictims of the weatherwe float like a ship atsea how do you…
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finding the river
Yesterday I was outside myself watching at water’s edge,wanting to know dark knotted wood, snarled heartof split oak, a pliable tangle of maple and birch bleachedon the bank—set free by nature’s rage. My eyes grippedthe storm. Something mystical happens in a turbulent river—rush of sediment over rocks, driftwood pieces rippedfrom resting places collide, tumble end…
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spring is my love
Todaya ballad of light!A soft breeze brushes and blowsmemories erased of a dark winter. I have been homesick forspring andtrees.Homesick for song and lush leaves;cavernous and yearning to be filled entirely. A jubilee of flowers, stalks reaching to downy clouds and satisfied stretchBuds grasping through cool soilreaching for light and familiar hold. How long…
