kingsoftrain

Carl Boon lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at 9 Eylül University. His poems have appeared in many magazines, including Posit, The Maine Review, and Diagram. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Boon recently edited a volume on the sublime in American cultural studies.

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THE CHILD AND I

From its place on the sofa
the child, not yet three,
discovers patterns in the way
we talk and move. You call it
a filament of understanding,
incredible, and soon we’ll be,
you say, enveloped in its thoughts.
But you are the father,
the one with secrets who needs
a universe your own—a place
of maps and streetcars
with foreign names. For this
I hate you, as I am here with it,
aware of fractures, planning.
I must listen while you listen
to Pound name the wildflowers
south of Lanzhou, Eliot tap through
Russell…

KNOCK
poems, Melissa Atkinson Mercer
Half Mystic Press, 2018

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‘…a mirror covered by a bright cloth.’ – {from} too emphatic,

‘Like me, already like me, all burial, all mask.’ – {from} hush now & heed:

As if named by, or for, a shape, Melissa Atkinson Mercer’s Knock extracts myth from the clinically elusive and gives oath an otherness that is unanswerable and local. Ritual is not routine, here, and voice not theft. With creatures unperceived by human brevity, Mercer not only honors the bodies that move from story to story but grants the before-life of their speaking an expanse in which to lead footprint by the mouth away from tightrope’s shadow. A stilling testimony of mobile cessations, Knock is exit music for silence.

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reflection by Barton Smock

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book is here:
http://www.halfmystic.com/product/knock/

RETURNING

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god’s brain in a small hat

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(rabbit)

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from surgeries
and gardens

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a crownless mouth

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my angel is a scarecrow in a sleeping bag. heaven a movie theater in spain. she walks that way because she is trying to step on her blood. the boy at the gate is lost and must choose either frankenstein’s childhood or a more diverse nostalgia. orphans on earth smell like bread.

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there are pictures of me sleeping that are responsible for my brother cheating on his diet. apples the shape of going home. sex addicts fighting to direct a musical about the number of people disappearing

to let death
mourn. there is a chair in an open field. a throbbing in the palm of sound’s publisher. a kid under a blanket asking god

when did she know
what perfection
was. a mouth that was a bomb

/ before…