Bone dry river. Red sand where the water once ran. Boulders that were stepping stones. No cattle. The wind is never gentle here, merely patient—the mesas could tell you that. The vast fields of scrub grass where nothing we’ve planted ever takes root. The way the rain floods everything and is gone, is like kindness…
I felt it when they hammered out these feet and carved the flesh between these long toes of mine and when they rubbed narrow the stalks of my legs into calves and thighs—yes then and when they shaped my groin outward instead of in and rounded my ass same as everyone’s yes—then…
If it isn’t a disappointment it’s an overwhelming number of coincidences. Because really I don’t need another you another pigeon like you, I will tell them. You are at the same time an embraceable construction and of Kansan descent. Nouns and nouns and metal and nouns and you might suffer the weather but…
This is the small hill Landscape of the middle country I love and I am on it stumbling down in high heels This is the last evening No light in the squandered wood The gentleman farmer still awake His back to my back Verdant in blackness is a twinkling Is a wet streamlike thing…
—ágnes nemes nagy every few minutes, through a metal flue the throat bursts into flames from the furnace above my bed. it’s the color of fire. i can see the chokeholds catch. fire ants carry off the heat down the metal ducts, and the vents push out the heat, which falls down the walls behind…
She’s been warned not to sleep with moonlight on her face or she will be taken from her house. She wears eel-skin to protect herself. She tilts her face to the night sky when no one is looking. During the eclipse, eels bubble in their dark and secret caves. Toads frenzy in pastures…
Despite the moonlessness a glow still lives in the lighter stones, yonder a great seam of quartz beams stars back at the stars. The nightwalking habit he cannot shake, and shunning headlamp or flashlight he goes slow. He knows the way through the woods well, sometimes waits a spell, took a hard fall once it…
Be it so we were among them. Veins in the fingers that remember, will. Every vacant gaze an arc. Drawn against impassible night. The sky trapezes a decade, one letter hurls after another. Huddles nameless on the grid. Where did the child bright swerve among inky knees. The animals press dumbly forward in a crowd…
The middle of the river closed The main channel of navigation From mouth all the way to the island there You see the light between Fishing boats we call the channel the real thing We’re deciding It’s a point of commerce and pride to be Nobody argued with respect to the…
Fall 1980 - Digital