On tv, the baby guards a salt lick while wearing the crown of thorns as a belt. Outside the tv, a random sister pulls her thumbnail loose and a paper doll starts to breathe. The fish watches all of it through a hole in the fish.
the skull of a child who can’t swim. whose friends
tried.
–
a horse for my puppet. a shadow’s first bone. the pill
in the egg in egg’s dream.
–
forgetful
lightning.
the deer dad resurrects.
not human enough for the census
poems, Erik Fuhrer
images, Kimberly Androlowicz
Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2019
~
A controlled burning of disparate abandon, Erik Fuhrer’s not human enough for the census deadpans, verbatim, the deepened instant. While the wordplay here is surprising, scary, and clinical, it is never created simply in service of becoming, but is instead sung back to both mouth and bullet hole as an unadorned canticle of detached vesselhood. The spacing of the poems coupled with the permissively decaying imagery makes for an unfamiliarity that describes things that are not the things described and breeds recognition on a land owned by embodiment. This is giddily annihilative stuff. Here is the math I did, during: when three of anything exist, it’s always the first and last that worry over how the middle processes apocalypse. The math I didn’t: whether white noise or fog, your machine better be working…
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Hard Damage
poems, Aria Aber
University of Nebraska Press, 2019
~
“…every aunt has a son
who fell, or a daughter who hid in rubble
for two years…” – from Funeral In Paris
Of hermetic departure and homeless echo, Aria Aber’s Hard Damage is a work of deep citizenry in which words begin to sound like the words they were made for. Or from. I’m not sure. One moment I’m packing snowglobes in ash and the next I’m losing my footing while listening to a eulogy that distance has written for want. What landmark nostalgia. What shocked intimacy. Aber knows speech hides in the saying. Knows headline is a melancholy click twice removed from identity sorrow. There is no undoing in the doing. Revelation, here, is baked into the bone. If Aber’s imagery renders hypnosis a given, then this language has it go without. Be taken, reader. So covertly enspelled.
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and here I tell my son, who’s never heard a cricket, how long I believed in god.
not every tooth makes it into the group of teeth I know about. a mother is told by god that her writing appears read. you eat like a bird then eat the bird for saying nothing. I warm a hand on a burning fish. our water seems distracted. by the ghost of what he’s killing.
kingsoftrain 