The bomb is never here long enough to know it’s found us. Son in bird years you’d be dead. A stomach holds on to its hand-shaped sleep.
some recent reflections at isacoustic.com:
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through a small ghost
poems, Chelsea Dingman
The University of Georgia Press, 2020
Chelsea Dingman is a poet who makes you feel as if you’ve entered the dream a little early. Otherness is something that happens to others, and pain hurts in two places at once. In through a small ghost, it is this meditative displacement that allows the work to both worship and curse the prolonged destiny of its sudden and devastating inheritance. Be it a projected disappearance or a vanishing root, Dingman identifies first the caller of the form that keeps us from so many shapes, and then the unreal form itself. As any breathing in this held verse might poke a hole in the haunting and send a smoke ring to show the fog how its wheels have come off, the poems keep their witness on the made from and made by, achieving not only something to be seen, but also something protected from watching. And in this protection are many spiritually assertive mercies, elegant and ruinous, gifts from reversal of which the most healing might be that when a thing goes, loss doesn’t always get there first.
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Toxicon And Arachne
poems, Joyelle McSweeney
Nightboat Books, 2020
Of course, being a weak writer, I want to say rare. I want to say rare in as few words as possible in the direction of Joyelle McSweeney’s Toxicon And Arachne. Somewhere two toothaches are perhaps reunited. Somewhere one is unpinned from the world while feeling in the dark for a donkey born without a tail. I also want to say playful, but no. Sadness loses all its money to sorrow and there is a jovial genius to the trauma of wordplay. I think what McSweeney does is done with what I’ll call, in my lack, the endangered available. Mouth of a gift hearse. Erasure’s only prediction. From such given, McSweeney recreates addendum without precedent. Think of what one hasn’t read, that is being written, and how briefly it will exist unwitnessed. And how fast the work of de-witness. And how suddenly we’re having the dream that just recently we lied about having. I love this work for its slowness, for the uninfluenced offhand of its disruptive healing. Here is a line from McSweeney’s poem PT Cruiser: ‘That’s like, harmonic. Monstrous.’ I am injected, I guess, to vaccinate the new you. Loss has two syllables: loss, comma, loss. The verse of Toxicon and Arachne lives in the present and in the present it took.
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Ribald
essays – Alina Stefanescu
INCH, issue 44
Bull City Press (2020)
The writer Alina Stefanescu is a student of curious worry, loyal to irreverence and a giver of passage and path. These essays, on sight, put one in the middle of understanding, where one knows perhaps how to read, but not yet how to re-read. As a child, I heard of a child who stopped playing hide-and-seek because they would forget to hide. I heard this from a child distracted by god. None of this is true, but it could be. Ribald is a work that continues to begin, that opens the body might it out what’s been baked into, that offers the unexpected as a cure to prophecy, that misplaces to protect.
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a trapdoor meant for a circle, a body
from a puzzled
lake, god
falling ill
in a dream, back
to back
cures
for skin
To heal her brother, she asks me to brush her hair. She jokes that when I’m done she’ll not only show me the scab but also remove it so I can see where her batteries went. I tell her the fish are biting and that my father is wanted. Touch leaves me alone and it must look often as if I am trying to get a pair of scissors to eat snow. For every angel sick of heaven, there’s a shadow passed out in a dream.
A skull has nothing to do with a seashell and a dryer is not an oven. My brothers don’t remember being taken by aliens, but still believe that god is serious about studying who misses us. My dad has a single idea much like a pregnancy test has none. I dream in twos. The unraised wolf, the worshiped stork. I want a better world, or to get food poisoning from hunger. I hope my son has one friend as harmless as an ear.
father making book covers in the nude
his longhand moving in the veins of a giant
his name an ant sleeping in the center of a band-aid
what if the end stops coming
a crow is not a star
the eyes know nothing
but know it first
loss is the salt of now
I miss the radio being off
even when
it’s off.
Forty baseballs going dark.
I lost someone
and lost their death.
Loss changes its name to loss and then back to loss. Time runs out of death. As a kid I wanted there to be a fish that was alive because it was the only fish. The gone, to themselves, will always be the last to have left. I don’t sleep and you don’t sleep and together our not sleeping is a blessing that disguises scarcity. But god has nothing and keeps even less.
In one stopped car, a baby with a staring problem is on hour number three. In another, my sister takes photos of her dog. I leave my own car to find the icicle that will become the mirror’s rifle, but I know I’m to be killed by the wind for a thing as big and as little as rattling a scarecrow’s keys under any table that ain’t been set. No story needs told yet here we are outing angels to a god best remembered for how it covered the noisemaker’s brevity. Does shape forget its poverty, or poverty its shape? I ask you on a train about the wheel you’re asleep at. If the food came early, we’d call it starved. Dying is a chew toy. Be as unmoved as your attackers.
As quiet as a doll’s neck
a bell
dies
for the wrong
church
–
I watch it again and again
your goldfish
outlive
a bowl
that’s frightened
of sleep
–
No animals were created in the making of this harm
kingsoftrain 