city 93 Yesterday only exists if everyone believes it at the same time * city 94 Not until you finish eating what's outlived you * city 95 This is as far as I go: My lookalike owns nothing
city 92 Though up and down a son's arm I move with my fingertip that phantom dime Touch is not set free
BONE HOUSE
stories, K-Ming Chang
Bull City Press, 2021
~
K-Ming Chang's Bone House is a thing set down and a thing lifted, a thing out of place yet also the thing that is already an only belonging, that pulls a room from another room. If one feels named after the name they were given, this is why. Chang's language seems both imbued and evacuated, ghosted and gathered. The story itself, the stories themselves: is and are. I don't know. As for the story in these, our imperceptible ask: it is worded the way we've wished it told. The survived unshareable, the return that gives longing an end date, the romance that pearls possession from a cloned twin. And still this all becomes the first we've heard of it, a retelling of the offhandedly internal.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
~
book is here
city 91 An ambulance from dogcatcher’s dream puts the hurt on a flickering cornfield. Past small pockets of boxcutting amnesiacs go the bicycle legs of the non-born. Without hell, our cellar is a mirror collecting all that thunder can hear. Never done, I saw yesterday what a swimmer looks like so close to uncovering god's one-eared suicide and made a ghost out of anything except a ghost.
city 89 Less recently, home of the longest newborn * city 90 Band names include Winloss Childgroom and City89
LIGHT-UP SWAN poems, Tom Snarsky Ornithopter Press, 2021 ~ Oh, here we are. So far from our own writing. Here, again, thinking there is little left beyond yesterday's afterglow, beneath tomorrow's aftermath. I always believe I'm done with it, of course. And then, oh. Here. We. Are. Tipsy, and weeks into listening to a soundtrack no one wrote for a nightlight while opening and re-opening Tom Snarsky's collection Light-Up Swan. And there is hope in the hope that fate might finally volunteer. That going missing will go missing not as ordered by absence but instead as a goodwill gesture given to a presence that needs nothing in return yet desires a return on our nothing. And is it ours? I don't know. What I can speak to is how quickly this reflection of mine reappeared but only because it believed it had vanished. I'm here for that kind of belief, for the kind of work that starts sometimes, as Snarsky does, with the line This poem happens in an actual lake. I'm here to feel...far. Something factual: The first poem here is called The Star-Field Paintings and it is very beautiful and hard to move on, or to be away, from. How are there poems after it? There might not be, yet I could speak on them, and have been, and haven't heard a thing for weeks. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ book is here
city 88 Your car long gone You hear from your father about a city that has One raccoon no cinema
city 85 Your body won't change if in your dream There are many people * city 86 Hand, hand, bar of soap. Some fish are never Hungry * city 87 Even god's children get their death from books
city 84 City of my grandmother, grandfather, aunt. City of my human year's dog. Death has never known what it's looking for. Believes it will remember
city 81 I forget to eat and god says I am swimming * city 82 The sleep I do in my sleep I can't carry this * city 83 My son's wrist Was a flower But vanished
kingsoftrain 