Tuesday poem #222 : 신선영 Sun Yung Shin : THE WOLVEISH FORAGE

each day is a gorgeous wet machine - - -  the rain-slicked bridge under the night bridge - - -  let us walk together along its swaying twisted cables and let the rivets fall from our necks as we shed sky and pelt and heat and sleep

I’ve written your undertow into my will - - -  I have signed it with a fistful of bloody salt - - -  this wound my last resort - - -  all the music in the dark brine of my heart - - -  its secret pangs like a muffled church bell - - -  my eyes these hard gates and every kind of armor

you knew we were warmongers and cannibals - - -  you made me into a wolf whereas before I ate everything bleating and shivering - - -  whereas before I lay myself down in a lonely grave with my outcast fellows - - -  only now to confiscate the law of lucid dreaming upon this small invisible fire

///

you signed this contract of wheat paste and unconditional city rain - - -  you summoned the wailing wall - - -  you made a socket out of our last night - - -  into the diurnal wilderness we turned into swallows and sewed yesterday into our open mouths - - -  open to eat wind - - -  open to make dark rooms for ghosts - - -  for the pack of wolves inside the teeth

rough blood - - -  lurid orbit inside the subtle body - - -  the vindication of God - - -  the deposition of Lucifer - - -  all the rivers of mercy flooding the rings of Saturn inside your morning - - -  tint of gloat - - -  the void my guide - - -  the son of the god his heart on a stake - - -  a jar of water drained like this eulogy - - -  some indelible outline branded on the skin of the earth - - -  the earth in flight - - -  the earth in pursuit of this heavy light

in this wolveish congress with the letters of the dead - - -  my appetite for graffiti - - -  genuflection to the twenty-six occult symbols made of leopards and glass and fury and orphic keening and wax-wing flight - - -  each day is a prince on his lesser throne with his lesser hate - - -  his strange brother left in the forest - - -  left to make a machine out of the indifference of owls - - -  what to spell with their pellets of the delicate broken bones of mouse and vole - - -  every night is a widow

///

what the outside woman craves is strange testimony of the despot - - -  the law and the police report in illegible half-tongues - - -  if you could swallow scissors and thread and birth something durable - - -  your own face and body but burning on the outside instead of the inside - - -  the despot is the gloat of caw and mercury and an army of centaurs en route to the farthest necropolis - - -  their bloody hooves the calligraphy of man - - -  uncanny man in medias res - - -  dragging the penal colony behind them as if shadows were machines and crimes

the pack of wolves inside me spent a year in silence studying the corpses of flight of the architecture of wind - - -  the ships breech birthed on surprised shores - - -  coasts with chronic insomnia - - -  facing always the wet suffocation of the great black fish with no face - - -  the great creature a mass grave - - -  the shapeless tunnel to swallow light and gravity - - -  the pack of wolves gnawing on a manuscript of organs - - -  each with a hood - - -  each harboring its own verses on the body

summon the heart’s four-chambered congregation - - -  we will chase our wolves through the starving blue to the piquant red - - -  what kind of recovery does the tongue make in its dark narrow room in the back of the throat - - -  all the strange velvet inside me - - -  rooms and rooms of it - - -  a suite of crimes and siblings - - -  sharing duration - - -  sharing a soldier’s reprieve - - -  my body a kind of necropolitan cradle - - -  a museum blazing on the inside like the world’s last night circus

///

if I vanish after a certain conjuring - - -  follow the spelling - - -  follow the leopards with human hearts in their mouths - - -  follow the scent of singed fur as walking through flames is often required to renew the hollows of the world

lucid dreaming a kind of air balloon travel - - -  oneironauts floating through ships built hastily in the space between wake and sleep - - -  assembled and disassembled by morning - - -  the wood shavings and surplus boards and uncanny convex portholes left hastily under your narrow bed - - -  they keep falling through the floor

the perimeter of the bed guarded by my soldiers - - -  the black laces of their black boots caught in my hair - - -  binding my hands

///

when I gave the wolves my opera glasses - - -  binoculars - - -  magnifying glass - - -  telescope - - -  pinhole camera - - -  and a set of sharpened knives they set fires all along the tree line - - -  they set to polishing the world’s remaining lonely library carrels - - -  eating the empty space along the way

the poetics of wolveish space and the displacement of air with the hot breath of the future - - -  I fell asleep in their den which filled with night-serum and the medicine became my lungs as I wandered through the rough carbon sleep of abandoned coal mines and saw my spirit panning for gold in the streams and creeks of the dead

I saw us there - - -  lingering over the remains of a spectacular - - -  glittering feast 

///

perhaps born in a crime scene - - -  perhaps drawn from my mother as though an exorcism of pins and needles - - -  perhaps a child is a prosthesis and a pantomime - - -  perhaps a child is a cauterization of an oblivion

no matter because I am a maker of tourniquets and a hawker of all the holy orders of the world

God has chosen me - - -  lowering all things to me on a rope - - -  busy reading the syllabus of the body I leave the knitting of my white cloths and send the wolves inside me to the grotto with that vintage water from snow melt - - -  that water that tastes of the birth of planets - - -  of the iron moon and its magnetic dreams writing roses all over the night-skin we wear like a priest disgraced in his winter hunger

perhaps my private hospital business will expand into purgatorial burial ritual and the eros of prayer - - -  they will come from far and wide not to be stitched back together like dolls but to pay homage to me as to a fine landlord - - -  a man who hoards the calamitous light under his robes - - -  a scholar of usury - - -  perhaps I was born to be a minister of handbills and rainwater

///

a human-headed bird made its arrival night after night - - -  in my dreams I fell down upon things which are hidden during the day - - -  which advance upon me at night which draw my lightless body downward toward their receding forms - - -  which remind me that I have submerged the boat of my enemies and brought myself to silence

I surrendered my mask and maps and deck of cards to god who made me his property without quarantine or inventory - - -  a plate of ozone slipped under the cell door - - -  the key made of mushrooms and eaten every morning - - -  a shadow made of soot - - -  he brings me a kind of a spike to bleed the humors that turn to dust when they meet the air - - -  he promises new veins - - -  he promises gifts like morphine and exams I’ve already taken  

in this city of God - - -  all the stones rose surprised before me as a flock of birds disturbed from their morning feeding - - -  the stigma of childhood marking my palms and feet - - -  orphaned by pain - - -  I felt nothing though I attempted repair of the body’s summers through a kind of Christmas pageant - - -  then a swimming through the dream of olive groves - - -  then the quilting of buried music into twelve gowns - - -  then the eating of worms - - -  then the gathering of incomplete births - - -  and a series of flashbacks immaculate as the white room of the ivory mathematics of Mary - - -  we fell upon the placenta still pulsing like a heart and gorged on it like a pack of wolves 

///

we shall be purified - - -  we were promised - - -  we were soaked in rum and honey - - -  drunk as choirboys - - -  the many anonymous eyes all over their unnameable bodies and their backs made blank for punishment

one day I was offered an advance cremation - - -  why wait I thought - - -  let the gross body fall away - - -  let me save the organs for later - - -  let me fill these jars I have inherited from my mother’s mother - - -  let me empty them in that field down there - - -  let me visit the slums of the world looking for the king’s trident

let me bury my brothers who come endlessly from over that hill - - -  who come like a line of ants - - -  like a swarm of bees - - -  like a ring of fire

///

from the eastern gate to the western gate - - -  I 

:::

made a womb out a sparrow’s nest

assembled every meal out of moss and the scorned end of each hour

used my palm as a cutting board

wrote a child out of forbidden grammar - - -  a grimoire

a child of pure glamour - - -  a child not to be looked at directly

a child to walk ahead and not look back

:::

orphaned myself every morning and every night

let the wolves out of my mouth at noon and swallowed them for dinner

never fell into despair or aporia

reused every letter as a frugal woman was taught to do

dactylic hexametered several martial epics while my husbands were away at the wars

:::

engraved a secret dossier on God and buried it under the floorboards like a heart

finished him a suit of armor knit from stinging nettles

abandoned all ghosts who entered me with good intentions

신선영 Sun Yung Shin is the author, editor, or co-editor of six books and one chapbook: Unbearable Splendor (poetry/essay); Rough, and Savage (poetry); Skirt Full of Black (poetry); A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota (essays); Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption (essays); 쿠퍼의 롐슨 Cooper’s Lesson (bilingual book for children); and My Singularity (poetry). She is a contributing editor at Aster(ix) and Society Editions, and lives in Minneapolis.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #221 : Eryk Wenziak : three visual poems

Eryk Wenziak is art director of A-minor Press, art editor of A-minor magazine, and Editor-in-Chief of rigormort.us. His poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies and his photography and artwork have been featured in several gallery exhibitions around the Brooklyn and NYC area. He is the author of four chapbooks, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, and has a full-length book of visual poetry and collage titled i need space, published in the spring of 2017 by Deadly Chaps Press, followed by a gallery exhibition and book release where prints from the book will be on display. As a designer, Eryk’s photography has been used as the cover of six full-length collections of poetry by well-known authors. His artwork is currently represented and sold by the Brooklyn-based Smith and Jones Gallery and various limited-edition prints and original pieces of his work are also available for sale on his personal website.

www.erykwenziak.com

www.smithandjonesart.com/eryk-wenziak/

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #220 : Sarah Cook : I WISH I WAS A PROFESSIONAL FIELD-SOUND IMPERSONATOR BUT INSTEAD I AM A BUG

here comes the sound of the sun, wilting. i just remembered wishing, i just remembered spare parts. & then my mouth closing tighter than ever before. i said nothing. & then, accidental leaves. & then, accidental house-space. this is the house, this is me wishing for elsewhere.



*



i mean the breath of a full chest is almost like the park you can run through it you can play outside you can sweat until you fall down & stop breathing then your chest is empty then the park is empty.



*



these are the colors i would like to see invented: cutting down animals; empty silhouette; invisible child; wet room.



*



the field has

memory loss the

field has apoplexy

the field has organs

to begin with & so

it can be blamed for

sensitivity or

accused of striking down

a woman



*



one time i invented the field i called it an empty silhouette i traced its lines & colored outside them i threw the field away. goodbye, field. goodbye small organ space i never fully acknowledged, anyway.


Sarah Cook writes and sleeps and talks in Oregon.

Her chapbook SOMEWHERE THE / SHAKING was released last week by above/ground press.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #219 : Sharon Thesen : AT MY MOTHER’S IN PRINCE GEORGE

The river passes so quietly

you’d fall into it if you were blind or daydreaming

its path so deeply scored,

so unimpeded by rock or shoal

it fails to sing

or splash but only proceeds

in the one clear direction, south I guess,

though it may at times diverge

as the bending valleys pull it onward

through canyons and underneath bridges

where a bright bush adorns a gravelly edge

people once sat on, thinking about something

as I do in my mother’s guest room’s

1940’s honeymoon bedroom suite, thick maple

bedframe, dressing table with photos propped

on a beige linen runner.

Old brushes and combs.

A mirror with a long handle.

*   

My mother and I watch TV,

eat our small supper.

“You’re so smart, dear,” she says,

“you should be on Jeopardy.”

The winning contestant loses all her prize money

with a wrong answer but clearly

has learned the protocol:

No crying or whining!

No gloating either, when it’s the other guy

standing there with nothing all of a sudden.

The new categories are revealed with a flourish.

We top up our glasses with Mom’s home-made Cabernet Sauvignon.

The three contestants look calm behind their pulpits.

*

Tonight’s chamber concert is titled Waning Crescent

for the type of moon it is this night.  Among other pieces

Mozart’s “The Hunt” from the Haydn Quartets

will be performed at the Lutheran Church with

its austere altar & fine acoustics.  The oboist is from Portugal.

It was beautiful but

driving around in the pitch dark afterwards

feeling old and diminished in capacities,

powerless and lonely in my mother’s car

trying to read the street signs, pretending

to know where I’m going, the guy behind me

pushing with high-beams on

near where big dim houses twinkle on a far hillside

way beyond my ken, I don’t know this place very well

anymore and I got turned around exiting the Lutheran Church

parking lot where the outside lights weren’t working and

a fellow with a flashlight was motioning this way, this way

*

It’s nearing the end of hunting season.

Pickups have been through the car-wash & sedans

contain more customers going to Seniors Day at the pharmacy

than camouflage-clad gun customers

surveying the parking lot in their rear-view mirror

Inside the pharmacy, swift and busy dispensing of tablets and instructions

I’m holding a form & when my name is called, I rise with alacrity,

I can hear alright, I can get out of here,

just an errand for my mother, not me, not yet

*

The concert-master announced that Mozart’s “The Hunt”

wasn’t really about a hunt.  It was just a name it

ended up with because of the prominence of horns.

I’m not alone though I’m alone here.

I worry about my mother, who’s 90 and having trouble.              

 A tree seems to agree with me

when I think one of us should move up here

for a while.  I think of all those I know with faraway mothers,

one in South Africa, several in England.  Prince George

isn’t that far but by now, my carry-on

is bulging and heavy, zipped up, the handle extended.

*

A huntress kneels in the night sky

drawing an arrow from her quiver.  A bear is standing up

at the Arrivals entrance at the airport, looking like a man

in a bear suit, which is what a bear is

in the occlusion of the waning crescent—

truth so modestly, so hilariously hidden

and present in the painted fur and long claws

of our disguises.  The shuttle arrives at 4:40 a.m.,

stars still out, the other passengers

mute shapes looking out the window

at nothing, the odd building with lights on,

or just darkness going by, already gone.

Sharon Thesen is a B.C.-based poet, editor, and critic.  Recently, she has published work in Arc/Cordite Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2014, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars (online), and Brick Magazine.  Her 8 books/chapbooks include Oyama Pink Shale, The Good Bacteria, and A Pair of Scissors.  She is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at UBC’s Okanagan Campus, where she taught poetry and creative nonfiction and co-edited, with Nancy Holmes, Lake: A Journal of Arts and Environment.  She has edited two editions of The New Long Poem Anthology, two editions of Charles Olson’s correspondence with book designer Frances Boldereff, and a GG-award-winning selected poems of Phyllis Webb, The Vision Tree.

tbe Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #218 : Matthew Henriksen : Room

I’ve loved a few people whose human figures convinced me one body
could hold another body in mid air while both bodies fell

a few people whose words held my face

a dish their hands would shatter on the floor if they
stopped talking for one instant

a few people whose eyes bored through me as time
burns a hole in the boarded up house of my mouth

as if the sun cares enough to ruin anything

It’s only humans who make a condition of shaking babies to death

who turn their love letters into funeral rafts and burn
the human condition out of any lover they once sang after
in the empty rooms where they sleep

Matt Henriksen grew up in Wisconsin, where he attended Lakeland College and received a B.A. in Writing before receiving an MFA in Poetry at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of two books of poetry, The Absence of Knowing and Ordinary Sun, and his poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Rumpus, the Arkansas Times, and in scores of other journals and anthologies. He has co-edited the online poetry journal Typo for over a decade and currently is a Teaching Poet and President of the Board of Directors for the Prison Story Project. His main project is raising his precocious and gorgeous seven-year-old daughter, Adele Cecilia.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan