We hate the future in early fall. You are worn and I am sorrow if sorrow is a woman who cannot see. Tell me our story. Were we perfect at seventeen? Did we make love in a hotel shower while someone nearby knocked and pleaded into the night? Did you visit New York in mourning?…
Distance, detachment, then, like lenses clicking together at last in alignment, the socketing, sprocketing, then always, like flame in a cave, sympathy first, then perhaps fear, perhaps for no reason something like rage but always this desire to parse, scan, solve, these sensitive bits of cosmos streaming towards me like filings to magnets, one then…
MASTHEAD Guest Editor Paul Muldoon Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editor Gregg Rosenblum Associate Fiction Editor Maryanne O'Hara Associate Poetry Editor Susan Conley Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Assistant Fiction Editor: Nicole Hein. Editorial Assistants: Hannah Bottomy, Kristoffer Haines, Michael Homler, and Jill Owens. Proofreader: Jean Hopkinson. Poetry Readers:…
I am as you see what most becomes me: miles skipped canceled trips masters yet unmet. Lace alone is loyal, sacred, royal, in control of crimes stopped by patterns of blood bred to best behavior. As you see I am what has become of me.
I didn’t want to only dream in black and white, but when the colors came back they frightened me, the reds I’d thought I craved, their technicolor poisons shimmering, an errant lens, a gauzy burning dress. Smooth forms deceive, give way to their own chaos. It seemed all equal signs had fallen off the earth—…
Last summer the Better Boys bloomed, tiny saffron flowers going off like slow Chinese rockets, and set their pinhead fruits. I’d ordered a pint of ladybugs from Burpee’s catalogue and scattered their crimson clock-backs through the furry, pungent leaves. I sat in my resin chair, observing the light of late afternoons move through rinsed branches….
The perfect ease of grain time enough to spill the flavor of a woman carried through the rain. Honey-talk tongues down home dreams a rushed but shapely prayer. Evening lips part to hush questions raised at dawn. The melon yields another slice. Fingers understand. Ecstasy becomes us all. Red cherries become jam. Deep juvenile sleep…
At that time I didn’t understand snow, the absence inside July, water and what holds the water in. Heard “It takes more than a forest to make a tree” in no one’s voice. By then the word meridian was extinct, echo without a face to place it, make it stay. Birds’ theories of heat hunch…
I first heard of Paul Muldoon through the affectionate enthusing of Seamus Heaney, who donned his conspiratorial mien — as if agents of some imagined opposition might be lurking near — and confided that his somewhat younger compatriot was “the real thing.” I sought the work out, though I’ll confess I was some time coming…
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