You’re still mentioned in the poem that kills you. Children confuse god. (Suicide for how it tells me perfectly nothing) Even weapons in Ohio let silence leave.
Men & Sleep Jay Besemer Meekling Press, 2023 chance animals a man a mania maintained Jay Besemer’s Men & Sleep is a restlessly melodic verse of fractured energy and subtracted expedition. Ah, the maleness of my fake and tired knowing. A me-shaped forgetting. A you. I’m exhausted and can’t sleep. Sleep won’t die. I don’t know what my speaking touches. I don’t know where. Here is weather: The recency bias of the wounded latter. Here is a forest: The unbodied nearness of the hurt now. Besemer’s voice is pinpoint, but also un-surrounded. Bread and breadth. An underground melancholy, a pop-up tremor. The middle is the only beginning that can disprove origin. Tree, because tree. Ah, this formfitting imagery, squeezed through a scarred peephole. And these who-less creatures bathed far-off by the darkening of tomorrow’s remnant astonishment. It’s all here because it’s all there. One will feel partially found. Not by the all-ness of connection, nah. But by the mapped disconnection that holds things to the same legit remoteness. ~ reflection by Barton Smock
The poor, when poor, comfort god with horror films. One misses with others with a single letter an entire language. Being is everywhere. Angels erase death for having a memory. Thinkers in the violet capital of atrocity invent thought. God is ok.
The rare the sober cigarette. The blinking start of a toy fire. God's name so long it cured my first stutter. The homesick spider's unmoved hunger.
Aftermath is dead Let the bomb believe it had a rib to lose Let the image of two birds sharing a stone be the end of my eyes In pencil ghosted pen let her write lifetime supply Childhood is necessary bc god can’t swim
The name of the ill child is password. The name of the dying is night. It doesn’t get too dark here. Quiet ant machine. Very shy moth. My parents are alive and were when I wrote this. Sleeping where god knows where.
For the second tower, I turned on the radio. The world isn’t actually the world. Rain finds a replica of me being nothing and death gets distracted. Hour, hour. I carry my fourteen year old son from room to room as I wait for air to sound like air and for one bone to take another under its wing. Make it about birds. God’s been here long enough to be real.
I could touch this in my sleep. It hasn’t changed. Attraction is a hole that breathing can’t find. Your dark mouth kills circle after circle and nothing from before makes it back. Not the angel making helicopter noises at a second angel being grown in a bloody deer. Not the face that became a face after seeing god’s face in a toilet not made for gods. Not the children. And not the children counting how many children can fit in a tank. Promise me something. I will eat this entire room.
LETTERS TO APPLE-TOWN Poems- Eliot Cardinaux Bodily Press 2023 BE STILL: POEMS FOR KAY SAGE Poems – Nadia Arioli Kelsay Books, 2023 The poverty of presence. The precise unknown. Eliot Cardinaux is a poet of dual trinities asking to be made whole. In Letters To Apple-town, jazz makes nostalgia from a future it’s never been from. Whether it’s ‘the world against the world’ or ‘more memory than memory’, there is a finality to these restarted verses that makes the offhand feel instilled. In reading this book, I have also been moving through Nadia Arioli’s Be Still: Poems for Kay Sage and am taken, and very replaced, by the elegantly accurate mysteries herein that make now a poor substitute for the recent. Somehow past, somehow addressing a future that comes from the future, the poems here respond to what ransoms the eye with a vision that erases hindsight. I lost my place not because it was a dream, but because I was stopped in my tracks before I could hide my sleep. This is a deeply awake work about work undone and reworked. Use your best hands. The crossover isn't theirs, of course, and only partially mine, but I like to think I drink and strangers carry me home or at least point me to the same car that knows only for a moment where it is I live. I am broken in all places in a way I worship too quickly and birds open their eyes with their eyes. Where Cardinaux says ‘psychosis of signage’, Arioli says ‘gory miracle’, and I suddenly know which angel is an angel and which angel stands for god, and which angel is the third and only. If that makes sense, both these books are for you. And then, for me. And then, again, for you. Seek them out. Their findings matter. ~ reflection by Barton Smock
We live as if god could ever be homesick. When I’m not looking, my body ah fuck. No golden melancholy for the surgeon with crushed hands. Death needs dying to be real.
