I’m seven months into this thing I am still naming. Much more myself, as in, able to again measure the correct amount of disappearance. I’ve never been a sudden being. I know there are poems I need to fix. The book of hiatus isn’t real, which makes it hard to transcribe. My daughter’s been in Ireland since last August. I am sorry that some of my year has taken some of hers. There are some reminders. I tire easily. The poems need broken. I mean to have other more wayward words for your detoured art. I forget forgetting’s mistake. Anyway, thank you. It seems I didn’t lose anything long enough for it to go missing.
Like watching a road movie in an empty house, Andrea Pallaoro's Monica is, by design, clumsily American, and, by detail, a hermetic ballet. Patricia Clarkson loses half her grip to illness beautifully, and we see the angel that saves her and the devil that rescues. Emily Browning and Joshua Close do well with small untouched touches, and Adriana Barraza looks at something we can only see. But the film belongs, and is given, to Trace Lysette, whose performance is a summoned stillness, a balance of childlike return and transformed vanishment. The last scene matters to all, but only because it feels like a first time for us and for them.
Vexations poems, Annelyse Gelman The University of Chicago Press, 2023 annelysegelman.com ~ Whatever it is you've been trying to say, or hear, can probably be found in the interior stoppages and outbound etymologies of Annelyse Gelman's spiritually forwarded Vexations in which the current devours the recent but goes on to imagine that it’s eaten a de-aged now and so becomes terrified of the present. Born invented, it ended so many times I ran out of weeping. Rooted in the everyday that has to relive with itself, it's a hard book to finish once. I found things because things were everywhere and I found things because they disappeared twice. With its snapshots of acceptance, vacated visions, and exiting accumulations, the verse makes of the moment an inquiry that speech isn't normally asked to speak for. A password, here, seems to know our password and Gelman creates access from a de-awed strangeness and discovers elsewhere as the anchor of locale. It looks like the world. It looks like my misunderstanding of the world. Illusions offer safe passage to holograms. Mirages aid in the evacuation of hallucinations. I look sometimes at my children as data sets of worry. I can't say how briefly I long for each. Vexations gives measure, and leaves one with a closeness glowing for the losses of its following. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ book is HERE
xii. I have three stories about god and one about death. How long until you're alone? When my shadow wouldn't open its mouth, light took the teeth of my ghost. Babies were heavier, then. Our cigarettes ate quickly in the dream that our eating couldn't have. Now there is a spider that can make a spider do nothing. A wasp that's believed its way into your thumb.
A thunderstorm turns on the microwave. We call it fixed and then listen all night to the bird in the broken dryer. We don’t blink for a year after a hand gets caught in a hand. We know it’s been a month since angel was on day two of having a ghost. Beyond that, the neighbor’s baby chooses one television over another. I can’t remember who I want to stop looking like.
Take 1 poems, Eliot Cardinaux Bodily Press, 2023 bodilypress.bandcamp.com ~ In my wanting to appear forever specifically to no two people, I go back and forth, or went, here beside, in hereafter, of the writing of Eliot Cardinaux, as it is, or will be, in the chapbook Take 1. First take. Or perhaps: First, take. Oh title, oh instruction. This white space of abundance. This absent plenty. If it's true that the same poem comes to all over and over, then Cardinaux writes to each of how to be, differently, again. In the reading, I wrote a note-to-self to maybe unselve: I long to be in the moment and also I pine to misremember, though I am suddenly wrong to have ever kept them apart. As such, I am still being struck by these thrice thundered poems, by how they hold, and give away, the optimistic loneliness of the unexpected. As in the joke where god tells crow "Crow, this is your last, warning.", the poem looks, and can only look, where it's already. ~ book, etc, is here
xi. Wasps at night. The heads of my brothers attached to my brothers. Time gives us god just long enough for it to get away. Sleep is for the perfectly made. Our crooked dog leaves our chewed-up place.
on the cross I get an earache
x. A son’s hair as a map eggs can’t use
ix. Talk about this whale in a way that mentions singing Not a specific whale just this whale There were two of me because I thought I was dying
kingsoftrain 