xviii. My sleep crawls into hers She hovers then holds an aerosol mask over the nose and mouth of our smallest The machine isn't trying to tell us something But cries anyway To its missing stomach If you google Vici Syndrome If you google Bird's beak Most of you have been Already To your last place To me the loudest noise has always been geography Death tells god it wants to die Not knowing where one is Was Heaven and the end of heaven
Birthmark and bitemark go as footprints into the dream of an Ohio bullet-hole. I want sisters but none of them remember being born. Sometimes when I turn off the oven tooth and pill have the same ghost. I can't say who death thinks it is. A swimmer distracted by water.
Dyscalculia Camonghne Felix One World, 2023 A blunt delicacy of slow care and tender economy, Dyscalculia, as doubly imagined by author and deeply reliable narrator Camonghne Felix, tells its story with its story. With break-up broken like the last romantic bone left as a soundbite trailing the howl that echo takes for snapping, it ensouls diagnosis with prognosis and makes of availability a border where on any given side a fringe context awards vision to those whose sight is an inheritance. Which is to say: It does the work. Felix uses verse as a suddenness with which to yield conversion from reversion while swearing on exhumations in a language that is both jarring and meditative. The performance itself designs a changeable, and elsewhere, audience that allows the reader to breathe above brackets and parentheticals as the marginalia of void and abyss. A warning, a trespass, a field, a comet- this is outside stuff that attends the inner. There is no reclaiming, here, of an old self, but rather a reclaiming of how one understands reinvention. To speak at its speaker, may we all ‘start to love what we know’, perhaps in stories such as this where the reading leaves those looking in the before-glow of its aftermath. ~ reflection by Barton Smock ~ Dyscalculia is HERE reflections by Barton Smock on the previous work of Camonghne Felix are here and here
xvii. We didn't think god would make a single thing. And now we're alone.
xvi. Gods take time. Photos named Sight’s late ghost… And all the babies. So far they seem one-sided
xv. You're the saint of how much we miss animals. There are two cruelties left. Not in the world.
xiii. and xiv. An ambulance carries itself as the dog of god. Nothing here is to scale. In prison, Ohioans hide bread in the bread. I out-hunger an abducted ghost. I set a bowl of soup in a shadow and wait for a rabbit to turn to stone. We call this road theft that it can’t be taken. I don’t know place. A tooth in my mouth that wasn’t there.
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
kingsoftrain 