Cut Off Places by Christopher Martino

c u t o f f p l a c e s edited by anja høvik strømsted andreas vermehren holm

c u t o f f p l a c e s

edited by anja høvik strømsted andreas vermehren holm

c u r at e d b y anja høvik strømsted karley knight

book design maria seipel

magikon forlag in c o o p e r at i o n w i t h cut off places books

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e m i ly w i l s o n

nonesuch

ars botanica

You come from unquiet country into rooms

To bear you in mind. To be jammed in your saffrons.

the marshes empty to at low tide. Region of seed kind. Its terraces secreted in rivers. The implicate system you live in or that which is all the while here unrenders itself, a civility

The abasement of these ditches of your smolderings. Of your abasement. Follow this in: we go weatherward? is this tenable?

of capture and let run. You are wondrous

The roothairs fuse for the openings to shoot from.

in a fundament of greens. Unknown but you are.

You leaf on the potentateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dome? You remnant in need of finishing? You gilt and swift execution?

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relict

green river

This is the ocean dead-reckoned into

There is the mountain that became the barren

autumn estuarial grounds in which drift

of rudiment silt. There is emergent

an aberrance of terns, the few barrier

instinct that stalled, acquainted then strayed

cottages closed up. The small vowel-shifts

to what odds. Far above the miniature

we have been through. This trend toward hometowns

tamarisk-imperfect shore the sediments

that are evermore strange. The textures

burn in their curtains. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve taken so long

eccentric in mud. Not figuring your end.

to come through. The archival exit

You become the lone trove of whole kingdoms.

speech still stayed at the mouth.

e m i ly w i l s o n

monadnock

Sometimes the whole thing stands still, residual ribbed as the stratum is of the branchwork. You are given the gruff versus the seams and you must drop back to recapture its stranded cloudcap. Fire, fire and fire, all toothed in the obelisk spruces. It seems to be listing, burled in the surface. The purple adheres to the back pivots, shunts over the scotched hump. No. It thrusts up burgeoning finer-tined, the parts more mobile-like. So the eye has no end going on outside its compulsion. Then the colors coruscate also. Then what does the bulk of it do. A rudiment-hoard. Then what.

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little gothic

We rode on a road through a wood The wood itself rode along a river Slow beige wade of mid-passage Between regions of our union In the form of a forest of tulip trees We rode on a road of seepages Bridged with viridians Sun took pause, low down What was almost gold We rode crossed with roads Closing in and paths that were more Like pressures Wild harts. Soldiers. A far little stage stung with figures A box with a breakdown at the bottom Just that the road moved off sequence The forest bore out its own office Its own kind of craft We rode through the wood along the river Beyond the mineral Over-richness that leads off An inwardness

e m i ly w i l s o n

the garden

insular

Down in dusk down in the treads the garden tends into its own untending, the grownout scrupulous detail, noxious deeds, the bowed lustrous willow’s busks dealt to the ground, all small detonations slung to the pathways, none but in the ruined miniscule tells what will be done: the cedar disclosing long from the inside out in serial installments in the midst of its piques in apposite internal rusts and browns: it keeps to itself bending back into something else staggeringly kept up— it can’t be ended: the garden must be ended in mid-stride, inside the husk, in rucked or spiked addenda: so strains the eye away from what it wants: what does it want? from resemblances? it has become too much the structure. of dark scutes.

spending off into the blue groins rocks scouring seaward of the dinted wild rosehips and the timely winter berries there among them shingle all we were bound to aboriginal underpinnings tumbling up the steep slake stringing flailed skirmishes always redoubling never not undoing the things done— knotted weedy wooly plastic into the turns the volvelle is at rest in prime outgoing you would have to make yourself stop

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serial

south pole

Something is reeding and condensing tentatively almost sculpturally verged on its rounds dusky suffering the tacit depths a structure of scruffs up under the fog it starts to take on mass within partitions ribs glumes rosing out from where exposure has been pierced with little shunts the light has to thrust down so glinting toward a center thought to be there

the stakes become a strict archipelago from the known scudded-over primary plot but was I there was what I saw sea-birds on the long ice runway someone said above the glitter ruts rigorously heaved and torqued twin ensigns of a silent stemming peripheral real off the far end where the plane went down then was laid in with snow you could crawl through and just make out the gloomed panels no one died what could be done the brittle rifts and windows vents cuts metallic stranded flock dumps depositories yields strewments

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beth hoeckel

b e t h h o e c k e l

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b e t h h o e c k e l

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b e t h h o e c k e l

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b e t h h o e c k e l

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ed skoog

e d s k o o g

mountain

Each mountain is a fool but together are genius and what glacier they give shuts me up again. I climb for approval on dull trail machined through fire soil turned ash desire drives derides me sweat and rash. I am talking to my brother. I want to be seen want the peak to turn and form a bridge between our eyes. I want the mountain to discover, name, and exploit me, be cartographer to what in me has lifted from the ocean set on its side and left to relic. And be haunted by middayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s undressing with winter and darkness fully shucked for the voyeurism of our nearest star. Bright pines narrow a route for pine marten following squirrel across a whole valley, small lives pursuing hunger larger than high ground. What I follow or what follows me, I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t say. Mountains are fools. My foolishness is so mountainous I stop before I reach the summit every time. I quarrel with the script, glimpse the narrative in its heavy fur across the meadow, rooting unmindful for the simplest need, its tooth a nail of ivory, and when I see the exodus burning in its eyes, I step backwards slow and navigate with the glare of my blind heart back to where I hang this face on its hook.

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photographing wolves

island

Them you’ll see when we get there our van shadow on the shoulder meadow loathsome with moon wide earth wise to collared beeping

Show me the raven that flies beneath the bridge the silence of an unremembered name. When the bridge is out the mainland’s only news the island sends to the far city like a dissected astronaut

I who tagged the wolves seasons past still chill to revisit this spring night howling they are ignorant of my science but not that I’m meat, and taste my scent for miles

is a pearlescent shatter and a drooping way with rope and the moon reproduces itself on waves. I play among the rocks, rough warts. Show me the raven that hides in the greenery.

I prefer data over anecdote as any story drives further either their scruff or our thought sovereign instead of all-burned face to face click camera shut and yet they persist

My hometown’s name has become a harmonica blown into distorted forms by onshore loneliness. In the plot of the picture so far the shark’s eye is a blind lantern and for half my life I say I don’t know

pour oil into river and yet some salmon return pave the midwest and yet a puma turns up from the Black Hills into the breath of Manhattan governor shoot wolves from heli and yet

down into green bottles that sometimes wash up. Show me the puffin that dives through the wreck it is no part of. Show me a wooden home underwater growing on this animal I am becoming.

snarl the midnight and pile the scat a hungry tongue that has never uttered modernism will never speak and yet casts its oratory silent into your lens and heart when we get there

e d s k o o g

times square

Nobody will talk to you here although you are worth loving and forget in the crowd’s hidebound and sapping entanglement the kiss you wait for in your town. Here, crush is--you have to admit--better in its anonymity than the body that will not give and yet know well, never more closely than among nobodies her cheekbones, hands, clavicle, ass, the way she pushes round glasses up to the notch they have made on her nose, how her hair sways when she looks up from a hard book, think of her the way, cold in the night sea, one overboard may embody in the last of his imagination rescue’s shapes, thrown ring that floats, or ladder rolled down from a heli, or sudden prow in waves, a green hand reaching out.

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lost valley

The tent dirty and my hands tremendous with dew. Ash now the firelight in which we removed our clothes. Sunrise starts at the rim and subsides. A fang of shadow back in the rocks where snow and rattlesnakes stay.Â Here is the wingnut that keeps the camp stove closed. Here is me closing the camp stove, because we are done breakfasting. Here is the canteen with the water, and here a red plastic to keep the soap in for sporadic washing. The method for rolling up the sleeping bag is all methods. This is the putting away of things we will not have to use again until we have exhausted our bodies on the trail again farther into the untold, farther into our own untelling.

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eliot lee hazel

e l i o t l e e h a z e l

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e l i o t l e e h a z e l

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e l i o t l e e h a z e l

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emmanuel hocquard t r a n s l at e d b y r o s m a r i e wa l d r o p

e m m a n u e l h o c q u a r d

a test of solitude

October. Return of the robins. What’s in front of my eyes. Viviane is Viviane. Alone, evident. To tell you that I’ve seen her. How I’ve seen her, having only this name to go on. To show you that my eyes I’ve seen her. Viviane is Viviane. That is to say I construct a solitude. It’s you I’m thinking of. Unique smile. I’m telling you of my smile. Her mouth.

The rule says to see is an active verb. I change the rule and say to see is a stative verb ( expressing state or change of state ). Which is obvious when one thinks about it. I see a leaf. I pick up a leaf. The two sentences are not equivalent. I draw a leaf is something else again. Giacometti sees a dog. The dog that he sees on this particular day. He says: “I am this dog.” He makes a sculpture of this dog. Selfportrait. I see Viviane. Viviane is Viviane. I write the sonnets of Viviane.

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sunday

16 november

Table burning in the dead angle. Its name is dark faces. I’ll subject the unexpected and inconceivable to mathematical formulas. Life could be this way. Stopped the music lesson, though. No, I say, there may be quite different reasons. Perhaps even an unanswerable question. The object of my flame? I see the stump burning in the dead angle. In the rain. The messenger of bread, overwhelmed by sleep. It is daybreak. Yes, her presence is persistent. Like the noise of a machine. Open your hands in order to sleep. What is the matter? Oh. The noise. The wasps. The water. The yellow clover. The pale sea. A walk in white espadrilles.

e m m a n u e l h o c q u a r d

xxiii There is the canale, there is the burnt stump. To pose the question of how to go from one to the other is to suppose that one can do it. And to suppose this is to posit the rule that there is only one space. That to go from one point to another point one follows a line across one single space. This is how sentences connect in order to tell a story. Walking in my mind between the canale and the burnt stump, I find myself in that part of space for which the word is missing. The walker I am constructs a space made of at least three pieces of different character.

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xxxi People can as it were come into being through their name is a sentence. What name to give to the space between the canale and the burnt stump, a question. The missing word is this name, an answer. This name the missing word. Look at the missing word is this name as a tautology. A tautology is not a sentence. Is utterance par excellence. An utterance is not a sentence.

e m m a n u e l h o c q u a r d

( book ii )

What empties a name of its substance. What kind of grammar would a grammar without questions be and what are the questions about. You are not a question, but surrounded by kinds of questions. It is snowing how do wolves howl. Yes, Viviane. Not answering any question could one say that yes and to be are one. Now yes. “I felt I understood.” Yes could be the missing word.

Viviane is Viviane, yes. Tautology does not say all but yes. Yes and all are not equivalents. Every yes fills the space of language, which for all that does not form a whole. One would not obtain a sum by adding up these yeses. What if we subtracted all from our vocabulary. Those wolves do not sing in chorus. The space filled by their scraps of voices is a broken space. Heaps of little spaces in juxtaposition sing around the points.

iii

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To describe where I write to you, turning my back on my books, facing the computer. My writing table. My reading table under the window. Two table. Lamp seven. The window looks out on the stone wall on the other side of the impasse ( the myth of the cave ) which reflects the light of the afternoon sun into the room with the singing wolves. On my left, this light. In my right, my library of American poetry. The books nearest me are detective novels and videos. On the right the files where I get lost. The screen before me.

xiv

I am telling you of this silence. Finger on the index, the rings. The cut. This black mark in the space delineates the architecture of the landscape. On these too mild winter mornings the fish, red shading into green, put in timid appearances, and Pierre says that the penguins’ territory is their song two by two to find each other amid the crowd. A period of silence. A long period where division begins. I am telling you of my silence and of the pain of objects. I tell of this solitude.

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joseph cummings

j o s e p h c u m m i n g s

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c h r i s t o f e r s a n d – i v e r s e n

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j o s e p h c u m m i n g s

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k e i t h wa l d r o p

communication

No sooner is the tea into my teacup and Rosmarie settled comfortably, across the room, into Proust’s world, I begin this scratching around after some semblance of elegance. Does that mean I want to say something? I don’t think so. But I confess a hankering after periodic sentences. Even while writing some other kind. As for Earl Grey, whoever he was, we may assume he preferred a rough but aromatic brew. There’s an elegant poem by Swift, on a bride who, unwisely, on her wedding night, has twelwe cups of tea. The kind of tea not specified. In experiments by Delgado and others, miniature electrodes are implanted in the tissues of the living brain, and precise charges administered by radio control. Sham-rage, shamsex, sham-sleep are all available by command. Charlus’s love-life, with such a device, could have been straightened out. Maybe also Proust’s, and his asthma. Everyone must have noticed – so it’s nothing much to be saying – how everything we drink turns into urine. Everything flows, sooner or later, and the rivers being, as they are, full of putrid matter and poison and whatever we’ve eliminated, I suggest thinking twice before stepping in. Otherwise, for the moment, no message.

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to rosmarie in bad kissingen

I just squashed a fat fly who was buzzing me, but he’s more disgusting dead. If we go by numbers, my old zoology prof used to say, this is the age of insects, more specifically: of beetles. This is also the age of information. I hope the churchbells of Bad Kissingen aren’t keeping you awake–though it’s nice, hearing tones decay. You won’t let the bells chase you to church. Somebody, just the other day, claimed that you and I haven’t any roots (he thinks that’s bad). It’s true enough that we’ve fallen between two generationsKEIT–one drunk, the other stoned. The one has inhibitions to get rid of (you know what that means: liquor and analysis); the other, a great blank space to fill. The wars of the young I think will be wars of religion. But all this letter is really meant to say is that you should leave those Kraut Quasimodos at their glockenspiels and hurry back here, because whatever we don’t see together has for me always a dead spot somewhere, even though I know that one place is much the same as another, and all the air we could breathe anywhere in the world has already, numberless times, been the breath of a fern and a marigold and an oak.

k e i t h wa l d r o p

my nodebook for december

for Ihab Hassan

Closing the door is supposed to open some inward source–as with, for example, the prayercloset: the text says go in and “shut thy door.” It’s a stroke of luck when traditional wisdom so matches the turning of the season.

History is hard for me. I’ve no sense for it.

2 I’ve often thought of writing a poem of grotesque length ( an epic, yes ) and setting the entire argument the instant after Gautama’s enlightenment, while it seemed to him he would pass directly into Nirvana, while the powers of good trembled thinking man was lost. It was only an instant, because of course the Buddha reconsidered.

3 Bulls for the bull-fight must ( this is absolutely essential ) be innocent. The very brightest are certainly, by human standards, stupid, but after a few fights the dullest among them would learn not to charge an empty cape but turn and massacre the fancy-pants who dances there for a bloody crowd. But, as Hemingway noted, the bull never survives. I can’t, myself, get excited about “life and death, i.e., violent death,” and have never been able to work up sympathy for the brute who runs with his head down or for the show-off, who has it coming. I’ll probably never develop a taste for battle or get seven novels written or kill myself.

5 The world–and if ever there was a self-evident proposition, here it is–the world is a big fish. I’ve caught it in my net. And now, long into the winter nights, wearily, I study my net. The fish stinks.

6 A friend talks passionately in favor of silence. I listen to him. He says, “Silence dissolves the categories” and “Silence renews the potential of consciousness.” And it strikes me that I should say something. But I’ve never been able to argue. And whenever there’s been a choice between speaking and keeping still, I’ve kept my mouth shut. Well, usually. And only after a certain amount of prodding I’ve produced the necessary conventional sounds, feeling the thread of words I spew inordinately fragile, certainly nothing to depend on. Whereas the craw of silence is vast and, anyway, already has us–it’s the scorching sunlight of a Nilescape or the wind across the Great Plains, burying us. Friend, waist deep in dust or sand, maybe we’d contrive a gesture.

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I passed the peak of my energy at he age of–it’s hard to believe– twelwe. Since then, little by little, I’ve collected the furniture of my house. I teach meanwhile, and I study, but no one knows my specialty.

How naive can you get?–I was wondering, when the Great Year comes around to this point again and the next me sits signing his poems Keith Waldrop, will he remember back across the void of Decembers to where I drift into these speculations? And a moment’s thought answers my stupid question: I remember nothing.

8 11 xmas

[ after Pessoa ]

A God is born. Some other Gods die. Truth has neither come nor gone, only the error has changed. We have now another Eternity, and the world is no better of than it was. Blind Knowing plows a sterile plain. Lunatic Faith lives a dream of worship. A new God is nothing but a word. Seek not. Nor believe. All is occult.

9 Time is molecular–so much for Zeno–and each moment brings everything out of nothing. In the beginning ( each beginning ) the universe is only a point–no dimension–and then it’s a world, for a moment, and each moment is apocalypse. Continous creation it used to be called, and now we say expanding universe, because ( I forgot to say ) each moment is more. Whatever else it may be, it’s always more. No wonder the poet cries “Oh, Oh,” or, on a higher level, lyrical verses. But don’t worry. I’m not violent. We all live in a residue of bright pulsations, a gob of time, an after-image.

When I think of the books you could fill with what I don’t know, oof. The pressing need’s for a phenomenology of ignorance. Everything has horizons, and they’re not just out of sight, they loom. Yes, and they beckon. An open door is plain and simple, like a wall. A closed door is an invitation. But if the knob is turning…? Well, I’m closing in, or opening up. I’ve been so bloody finicky the mysteries catch me sometimes with my lids down. But I’m preparing. I need many voices for my revenge.

k e i t h wa l d r o p

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comfort in numbers

There was, they say, a time outside of time ( but who are ‘they’ and how did they find out? ) when man walked in harmony with the whole globe, before weeds came to choke his food, before he earned ( how? ) the enmity of the animals.

I saw this morning, out a kitchen window, the ordinary robin, Turdus migratorius. Which may not strike you as unusual, in print on a page. But consider what a robin would be doing in Rhode Island in January.

But who is this ‘man?’

Most of my students have flown south.

I see nothing but the natural changes – frost forming, snow filling the air or, conceivably, signs of thaw.

I look for patterns, so of course I find them. As I go sniffling about the house ( it seems every winter I come down with flu ) I keep my eye out for a cosmogony. But only my field is finite. The rest of creation lacks something.

Everything is infinite. By which I mean only that everything is unfinished. There are certain parts of my body ( this is not altogether clear to me ) that my body itself regards as foreign, tolerates, that is, as a kind of alien. The lens of the eye, for example, can foster antibodies – can, I mean, under certain conditions, be rejected.

You were right, Gertrude Stein: there is no repetition. There is no repetition. I breathe in bad air like a promise. I breathe it out like a debt.

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gui mohallem

g u i m o h a l l e m

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g u i m o h a l l e m

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g u i m o h a l l e m

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g u i m o h a l l e m

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mona hĂ¸vring t r a n s l at e d b y j o h n i r o n s

m o n a h Ă¸ v r i n g

the girl from the mussel restaurant

We are attractively wretched, you and I, as thirteen-year-old girls when we wake up. Late in the day we sound out the bare rocks, slip on the kelp, sit on the salt-white surface, and cling onto what could be called our house. If we were stinging jellyfish we would possibly have a greater understanding of water. And we think of the same thing, you and I, in cheerful disgust, in sucking shame â&#x20AC;&#x201C; seductive and aromatic, leaning against a pinball machine.

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on dreaming biographically

I have lived many lives: When I was young the sultans loved me for my fertility, and because I only played with women when I bathed. When I was old I ate sweets and smoked opium, I was fat and lopsided and had bad teeth. Once I was executed because I fell in love with an eunuch who tasted like aubergines. It often happened that the young boys and I were poisoned out of jealousy. I have given queens acupuncture, I was the emperorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chef and had my head cut off because the swallowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s egg soup did not increase his potency. When I died I became a bird that got drunk on fermented berries and fruit, I flew until I met glass, after which I sat with my legs crossed.

m o n a h Ă¸ v r i n g

the transparent girls

We lived on a ship for several years, we chased the dust from the seaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s surface, we did not know how deeply anchored in life we were, we latched onto everything that convincingly resembled festivities: The strenuous hormones, all the burdens our small bodies could bear. Simplicity lay in a lacedup darkness where we spoke ungovernably. Were we playing the game, perhaps? We eagerly planned to acquire roots and substance. But time surfaced like dry husks, and heralded a delayed departure. We did not travel, except from when we travelled. On the tickets: our fingerprints.

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happy seasons

The first time Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands, the birds were easily visible, their feathers were covered with thistledown seeds, and above the surface of the waves the air was full of creatures that invited him out of his own time. For millions of years the lizards had chased the breakers, the tortoises had moved position, and in the growing darkness the insects changed biography. In Polynesia Darwin wed a small female willow warbler with pale legs. They read aloud for the algae that took lodging in them, and in friendly moments they borrowed each others colours. They rose in the light at ebb-tide, and sank in the sand when the tide came in. Thus everything they understood was sent back and forth in every single cell.

m o n a h ø v r i n g

symptoms

the black keys

A propensity for the ascetic – that I never got to intoxicate myself with nature.

I had lost something up on the mountain. Let’s go down to the sea, you said, let’s consume pickled plums, they protect against all dangers, and when you feel downhearted you must remember to look at the outside of yourself, and should you die, you will never have to die again, then you can sit in front of my house. And I sat in front of your house, I dreamt that I was a child, it was like a punishment, I heard animals cough in the fog, and you looked like the small shepherd boy.

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the little church down by the sea

the nymphs went their way

Remember how we wasted water, girl? We were careful, our hearts gently rippled when we imitated goddesses, the clouds melted, the months ran out of the calendar, all was mobile and wet. What were those day reminiscent of ? The nervous corals? That in us which breaks down? Remember when we knew the names of all the waves and everything blissful? We were in the process of growing up, little girl, we asked for protection for our mothers, and for common sense. And later, when we got lost, it was out of pure obligation.

The girls that returned as flowers woke up numb and thirsty in the forest, they made for the light, and light produced heat without demanding payment, light dwelt in the bulbs, the lumps of earth, the seeds, in the peace, and peace dwelt in the mountains, peace was vain, it had no enemies. And the girls swelled by the river, grew frivolous, all day long they hankered for apples, apples that were the basis of all sin, but there was no sin, sin had been abolished, it was mythical like the obstinate sheep.

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sigurd gr端nberger

s i g u r d g r 端 n b e r g e r

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s i g u r d g r 端 n b e r g e r

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s i g u r d g r 端 n b e r g e r

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q w o – l i d r i s k i l l

tal ’- s - go gal ’- quo - gi di - del ’- qua - s - do - di tsa - la - gi di - go - whe - li - beginning cherokee

I-gv-yi-i Tsa-la-gi Go-whe-lv-i: A-sgo-hni-ho-’i - First Cherokee Lesso: Mourning

Find a flint blade Use your teeth as a whetstone Cut your hair Talk to shadows and crows Cry your red throat raw Learn to translate the words you miss most: dust love poetry Learn to say home

My cracked earth lips drip words not sung as lullabies to my infant ears not laughed over dinner or choked on in despair No They played dead until the soldiers passed covered the fields like corpses and escaped into the mountains When it’s safe we’ll find you they promised But we were already gone before sunrise

I crawl through a field of twisted bodies to find them I do everything Beginning Cherokee tells me Train my tongue to lie still Keep teeth tight against lips Listen to instruction tapes Study flash cards How can I greet my ancestors in a language they don’t understand My tear ducts fill with milk because what I most love was lost at birth My blood roars skin to blisters weeps haunted calls of owls bones splinter jut through skin until all of me is wounded as this tongue

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Ta-li-ne-i Tsa-la-gi Go-whe-lv-i: A-ni-s-gi-li - Second Cherokee Lesson: Ghosts

Leave your hair at the foot of your bed Scratch your tongue with a cricket’s claw to speak again Stop the blood with cornmeal Your ancestors will surround you as you sleep keep away ghosts of generals presidents priests who hunger for your rare and tender tongue They will keep away ghosts so you have strength to battle the living Stories float through lives with an owl’s sudden swooping I knew some Cherokee when I was little My cousins taught me My mother watches it all happen again sees ghosts rush at our throats with talons drawn like bayonets When I came home speaking your grandmother told me I forbid you to speak that language in my house Learn something useful We sit at the kitchen table As she drinks iced tea in the middle of winter I teach her to say u-ga-lo-ga-go-tlv-tv-nv/ tea across plastic buckets of generic peanut butter wonder bread diet coke Try to teach her something useful I am haunted by loss My stomach is a knot of serpents and my hair grows out as owl feathers

q w o – l i d r i s k i l l

Tso-i-ne-i Tsa-la-gi Go-whe-lv-i: A-nv-da-di-s-di - Third Cherokee Lesson: Memory

Raid archeologists’ camps and steal shovels to rebury the dead Gather stories like harvest and sing honor songs Save the seeds to carry you through the winter Bury them deep in your flesh Weep into your palms until stories take root in your bones split skin blossom There are stories caught in my mother’s hair I can’t bear the weight of Could you give me a braid straight down the middle of my back just the way I like So I part her black-going-silver hair into three strands thick as our history radiant as crow wings This is what it means to be Indian Begging for stories in a living room stacked high with newspapers magazines baby toys Mama story me

She remembers Great Grandmother Rebekah Harmon who heard white women call her uppity Indian during a quilting bee and climbed down their chimney with a knife between her teeth She remembers flour sack dresses tar paper shacks dust storms blood escape

She carries fire on her back My fingers work swiftly as spiders and the words that beat in my throat are dragonflies

She passes stories down to me I pass words up to her Braid her hair It’s what she doesn’t say that could destroy me what she can’t say She weeps milk

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Nv-gi-ne-i Tsa-la-gi Go-whe-lv-i: U-de-nv - Fourth Cherokee Lesson: Birth

Gather riverbank clay to make a bowl Fill it with hot tears Strap it to your back with spider silk Keep your flint knife close to ward off death and slice through umbilical cords Be prepared for blood

Born without a womb I wait for the crown of fire the point where further stretching is impossible This birth could split me I nudge each syllable into movement Memorize their smells Listen to their strange sleepy sounds They shriek with hunger and loss I hold them to my chest and weep milk My breasts are filled with tears

I wrap my hair around their small bodies a river of owl feathers See they whisper We found you We made a promise This time we’ll be more careful Not lose each other in the chaos of slaughter We are together at sunrise from dust we sprout love and poetry We are home Greeting our ancestors with rare and tender tongues

q w o – l i d r i s k i l l

nothing like a love sonnet for greeley , colorado or something like a love poem for greeley queers , 1993-1998

When I escaped, I smuggled the color of lilacs— the only sweet fragrance for miles—and the bruised and brutal work as we hunkered down for the next attack. We honed an insurgent mercy, dislodged gravel from mangled heartbreak with our love gnarling deep in my stomach. I can’t forget the stench of methane. Maybe we don’t recover. Like a starling poisoned by Avitrol we always wonder Who they will lynch next? Who snarls in the cab of that truck? What does he crave? I wish I could write this fear away, rigid as a knife’s edge along memory’s throat. Greeley, you left a concave trench in my marrow, left my heart plaited with lilacs and broken glass slicing membrane. A labor of setting bones. The bloodstain.

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birthday poem for billie rain

for michael

because the galaxy hums i spin towards you as light love like a sprout lace roots of a tree that holds us incandescent inside the emerald memory of everything

chest hot heal laugh

repair our ancestors tell us ablaze with our oldest songs insistent voices to remind us that we are nothing without them without each other

hold touch raw sweat

beard skim melt soft

cheek lip thank face

kiss bliss heart miss

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ana cabaleiro

a n a c a b a l e i r o

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a n a c a b a l e i r o

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niall campbell

n i a l l c a m p b e l l

a nightmare as zhivago

The hundred miles of scatter weed, and a thinnest wood partition wall kept us from the uprising; our warm bed from the bed of snow. Nights spent where Puskin was retold as another version of our meeting— given new names, a higher caste, a devotion loud as valley rivers.

Then I go to survey how hidden our house is from the nearest road: the thin smoke; a path a tinker’s cart might think to find a coin if followed— but it’s hid well. Though by the time I find the foot road back, the house is dark, the war done, as I knock at our own door, it opens in.

tale

Perhaps there simply was no tale to return back to tell. No birds, three parish over, with human faces; no wolves with fingered hands that had been taught our sign for beg, for prayer, that might shiver in the cold. No stricken towns—just village after village, each with a slightly altered meal come evening. On and on; the word, its doggerel report. One time I almost fell on something worth giving this realm or road or route a name. but didn’t. Eventually I stopped with a local girl, inclined by the rumour of what she offered.

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the apple

I grew suspicious when it didn’t rot, still red as the day it was given, possessed with that enduring slap when caught, just right. Secretly though, I began to weight it sure that if it was wax the few lost grams of seeds and stones, would tell in the palm. But they didn’t. And I could never risk a bite so threading a thin wick into the flesh like its own white worm, I flared a match— only I didn’t, and I won’t. I’ll spark no light. I’ll take the darkness, and the doubt.

reunion night

How difficult it is returning once more and again to this old well, all water-skin and sopped moss, the bowl dissolving from its name and use—pulls up the thick silt of childhood, and the time when, and the place where, and long what if ’s. Drunk from, passed round the barroom table. Wearied, the sun drags down the day. I’ve nothing but grit on my tongue.

n i a l l c a m p b e l l

autumn , isle of eriskay

glasgow , nocturne

Down road, there’s a light in the window of the abandoned house—

The last to make the last circuits of the day, these buses are always no more than empty.

as if someone were trawling through its inventory of old letters

Old tickets from previous journeys, tossed, lay scrunched up in their failing origami.

and steel spoons, the tin box of unpaired earrings and cufflinks;

While talk’s as well passed over for a book or without a book a quick thought on travelling:

the things you can imagine being left and then the things you just imagine:

how homewards, windows dark, we know the length but not the landscape of the journey; how hours

the marks each passed moon didn’t leave in the floorboard dust;

go wandering by in road sign, road sign, road sign, set down along the route like ellipses.

upstairs, the ceramic bath, bored out, mimicking an upturned bell

Counted up, how many days of a lifespan are spent sat between reflections of ourselves,

even in its songlessness. Midsummer, and every hour

folding the tickets into our breast-pocket: their withered petal, their tattered swan or wren?

seems to slip off in practicing the attitude of kindness, but not the act. If only a lover were here, or that I had been the one to set that light, open the long-shut door, and let those things mean something to an evening again, lent this scent of rust to the downwind.

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wait

“Calvay, an island with no history of habitation” From a Governmental Survey of the Western Isles (1912)

Dear K-, what does it matter if, at some time someone piled together the thousand stones in a square, and thought that inside he could score on the walls his enduring calendar of water-rock and rain and kittiwake. And yet we’re here, men away from our wives, searching for signs of a sunken gable-end in the thick scrub—touch on touch, the blind amongst the blinding weather—a thrilled picture of our tenant: grey beard, broad, a stunted posture, an acolyte to the rough protocol of sowing, trapping, gathering, the practice of easing back the weak calves to the dark; whose deity was blind and old and drunk; who found the pockets at the hip and breast useful for nothing but a prayer’s storage. This man away from other men, as if this remoteness were so awful in itself. Dear, I spend the nights cursing him, the distance between the damp sand and your floorboard dust.

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k a r l – e r i k b r ø n d b o

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regan good

r e g a n g o o d

the birds

There were deep hollows, leaves. The elements of air, water, earth, fire ornamenting the sticks, the stems extending matter out. Now it is an electric chair, a stripped foliate with wind scrolling through it, banners of air, birds moving (â&#x20AC;&#x2030;threading, zeroing deftlyâ&#x20AC;&#x2030;) inside the tree shape. The birds tighten a wire. Here to there, a lattice of tripped mines: arrivals, departures. A diagram: Recall the fruit that hung. Recall the blight. Recall the leaf. These birds are scavengers. They dictate the inner sanctum. They say: Now we are the fruit, we are the lifeblood, we are meat-eaters. Clocking mechanisms rotate in our cores. We siphon the tree for our devices, it is our backdrop, it is expendable. We revolve inside the stricken shape, memento mori made of living tissue, delineating passage through bare branches. If you eat us, we will taste poisonous. If you touch us, we will draw blood. Snap the wire: We have sewn the remnants upright into a semblance of a tree, detonating extinction.

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the book of nature

Look, here there is room: rock, air, fire, water. They have given up calling. They have given up their differences. Birds choir the trees in this boneyard. The crows come and go as if the air were leisure—free of grooves, free of routes. The birds fly a cat’s cradle of strings, webbing the element that is air ( that is breath, that is a conflagration of Souls ), revolving and revolving, turning the pages like a madman believing he is a book, furthering the elements (rock, fire), carefully turning the pages ( water, air ), turning night into day. Onslaught of days made of arrivals, departures. The elements shiftless as belief, turning into the next day and the next. The night giving back its differences (rock, air, fire, water) until they are all a backdrop of a single kind for the one hand the mind knows the mind is.

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the masks

Masks hang from trees latched by wires. The branches are scarred with crosses. Birds defecate a black, uninhabitable reef. The masks rotate on their strings, twisting, lying, masquerading as fruit. They hang nationless, godless. They were the voice box, the mouthpiece, the vehicle for the swift intelligence to whine through: iron lung, Holy Sonnet 14, a loudspeaker rigged to a balcony. The wind ( with its tongue cut out ) lifts the masks slowly, insistently, stuttering through the eye-holes, the mouth-hole. I see God in the making, the wind casting votes. There is nowhere to go, but to the physical evidence moving there, arguing Classical Truths. Does something speak in the crease where the mask eats the face? Here is the lie. They are not Souls—their wires snap undone. They are not Souls infesting these earthly branches. But O if the wind could be something other than wind, whispers some inalienable right…

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the ruin theory of value

Watch the hand control the end. ( The architect Speer built the fault lines to comply. ) Hubris bends the natural law. ( Christ and his end ). These birds flying with thorned sticks build their nests in the dying trees. Outside the house, the trees are truly possessed by wind, by fire. The Poem ( the opposite of Ruin ) coheres inside the house. I watch two trees stirred from their centers turn every inch of surface into scorched earth: Let no stone go unturned, leave nothing standing. Recall the plans for the buildings, the outlines, the dotted lines delineating the massive stone steps, what the eye could see, and what was invisible to the eye ( a human hair woven into the bird’s nest ), a striation of human smell throughout that kingdom. What was invisible ( the wind itself ringing around each outcrop of branches, leaves, the wind noosing and noosing ) taking every last appendage down the stick.

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song

A hummingbird burns its body-fat carving a rut in air. A hummingbird with a blood disease ghosts the flower head. I sit. I watch. It does no good. Trees catch a headful of wind and are swept to sea. From here the tin-seam roofs suck the sun home. No way out from the direct fire. Attain unto it. The On High burns brightly: mine downsitting and mine uprising. If I ascend to Heaven: Thou art there. If I make my bed in Hell: Thou art there. The birds do not drag an evening curtain down. They clatter inhuman sounds. The hummingbird snags in the thorn bush. Panic drives the thorn points deeper in. Its neck goes limp. Its needle beak splits. Its eyes turn to milk. That bird drove rhapsodic through the clarity of the branches until it drowned in its own small reserves of lungwater.

monument of mind and matter

Leaves, seeds—the pavement studded with remnants, finery, details. ( Birds coalesce swiftly into the branches from the living ground. ) The birds are ornaments. They are sycophants. The tree is their idol. They cluster, teeming inside the sacrosanct tree shape. They are all instinct tracing the barren rooms, alighting on junctures, abandoning them for the higher atmosphere where the wind has blown itself visible. ( The birds inside scroll cyclic through this stronghold, turning revolutions. ) They sing songs of their devotion to the control box. They sing: We are jewels. We are idea. We are more than mind and matter. The air is cruel between us. We hover, a pestilence, supplicants to this division.

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birds ate the song and broke the light

Wild imaginings of clipped, winged things. Lord, a red cardinal. Look, Lord, your red bird. (Sparks burst from God´s jagged cuts: bright droplets of liquid love.) You reveal my mortal ignorance. In snow, a cardinal lands on a red twig, stuck through the bones with hunger. Mortal shock of the cardinal bright as blood in the ghosting snow—Souls’s bloody, rhetorical knot. I said: Dear heart. And so it flew. Hung a seeded bell, watched them eat it down to nothing but its net. Birds ate the bell so darkness & wind passed through and emptied it. Birds ate the song and broke the bell. Birds ate the bell seed by seed, then flew upwards and away—Whosoever knows a common bird? These squeak and eat and still the waters rage: Around them the same “integrated atmospheres” in which hangs the net their hunger made.

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lisa m. robinson

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