like the stagehands who wheeled out the sun when the actor was under the moon; like the scientist who thought the seeds of trees blown into the sea make birds— “I have seen them fly from the waters,” he wrote; like me saying my father died last night— he died ten years ago; like Newton […]
Poetry 90
Jonathan C. Stillerman: Pinpointing my father’s death using Google Earth
Satellite snapshot, August 7th, 2005, 2:15 p.m. Eye altitude: 8300 miles. Blue-green bowl of Earth on a black galactic shelf. Cowlicks of cloud, north and south. Click. Northern hemisphere. Click. North America. Click. United States. Click. Heartland. Clouds chased by Great Lakes. Grain states smudged with sage, ochre, charcoal, enigmatic lavender. Click. Illinois. Click. Chicagoland. […]
Curtis Rogers: After Hours, Philadelphia, the Discovery of Fire
We cut our sleeves over fountains. Gathered newspaper in parks of glue traps & Pan figurines. Stubborn, slouching, red as Hopper. We danced between the grains of security tapes, circled wall clocks with charcoal throats. In dresses smuggled from high-rises, shirts pungent with spit-shine. Window displays exposed their pressure-points to us. We gutted dust-kilned diners, […]
Liz Robbins: Arithmetic Mean
A school bus full of kids skids off a sleet highway and never will we forget the smell of green vinyl seats marked with graffiti. No one, not even the rain, has such small hands! Nor washes clean memories of the bloodyard, the plus and minus bullies. Two kids break through windows, and nothing will […]
Don Riggs: Knee Jerk Automatism
Frank O’Hara wrote very rapidly on a typewriter he kept about chest height on top of a bureau of drawers where he’d shove the finished poems amid underwear and shirts and socks that he wore to his job at MOMA selling postcards and ultimately curating abstract expressionist canvases by his drinking buddies late at night—the […]
Maya Pindyck: A Truth About Temperature
Out the kettle, a whistle like a neigh escapes the red throat of a drunk horse, animal or man, alone, collapsed on the road, crying out with the last stone of strength, his voice a burning silver howling louder & louder & louder until his maker rushes to close the flame.