Tuesday poem #479 : Joey Yearous-Algozin : On Poverty and Joy, or that a space would still hold a trace of our presence

 

 

— i know flowers to be funeral companions
          Etel Adnan

that we teach ourselves

how to die 

in the shadow of any ordinary thing

say 

a bouquet of white and blue

paper flowers

pinned to the wall

beneath two make-shift

picture frames 

that even as it decays

as the paper browns along its edges

collecting dust as it turns

from eggshell blue to a duller color

still holds

the memory of its occasion and the labor

of its folding

in the same way

the body breaks down

something intangible

that refuses

to be something other

than decay

or rather

that this refusal is simple

our extinction

written in the hand

or glance across a room

in which the memory of movement

itself so transitory

knowing that not only your presence will dissolve

but the room itself

will collapse

first the windows or the walls

leaving the space open

to whatever animals may enter

tentatively

at first

as they move through this space

that still holds a trace of our presence 

 

 

 

Joey Yearous-Algozin is the author of A Feeling Called Heaven (Nightboat Books), Utopia, and the multi-volume The Lazarus Project, among others. With Holly Melgard, he has co-authored a trilogy of books: Holly Melgard’s Friends and Family, White Trash, and Liquidation. He is a founding member of the publishing collective, Troll Thread. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #478 : Kate Bolton Bonnici : The Last Story Grandmother Told Me

 

 

We were not scared, playing
Each day among the graves.

Read the headstones, we knew
How we knew: sing the names.

 

 

 

 

Kate Bolton Bonnici’s poetry and essays have been published or are forthcoming in the Georgia Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Image, CounterText, Foundry, Southern Humanities Review, Exemplaria, and elsewhere. Her collection Night Burial won the 2020 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Beginning this fall, she will be a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Pepperdine University.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #477 : Michael Boughn : Extended Apparitions

 

 

 

Epistemic murk, god-laden
constituents & the large, thick reality
of things converge out of air
into moment’s clarity dip-stick mind
enters & leaves, dripping with time’s
remnants, fallen wreckage
abounds in recovered sight
apparitions extend into daily
bread & trespass heralds
translation into unknown
music lost to time’s
tidal sweep & eventual
abstract formulation
of the already haunts
memory leading down aisle
after aisle, shelves neatly stacked
sin, death, coca-cola
& horse collars indicates
the legalization of Love
in wake of increased Medieval
commute to distant fields has left it
in desiccated hands’ strangle hold
another link in the Chain
of Empire’s inside job

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The 12th century invention of the horse collar and the increased speed, range and efficiency of plough horses compared to oxen (which occurred around the same time the religious category of sin became criminalized), meant that fields could be located much further from home. This rearranged life in europe and led to the rise of parishes (religious entities) which replaced hamlets (small community). It also led to a change in relation to oaths which were forbidden by the New Testament, but became fundamental to European culture by the 13th century and came about because of the increased tenuousness of communal relation. The New Testament proposes people unite in the Holy Spirit and through the conspiratio, the sharing of the Holy Spirit through a kiss and the exchange of breath. The replacement of the conspiratio with the conjuratio (oath taking) transformed marriage into a juridical act that legalized love, made the supreme divine gift subject to the State's authority. It is the imposition and internalization of the law and the undoing of Christ's mission to free humanity from the law. It also sets up the internal, mental structures that are the basis of modernity.

 

 

 

Michael Boughn has spent much of his adult life straddling borders, leading to a lack of determinable national identity. He has published numerous books of poetry in both Canada and the US. Cosmographia—A Post-Lucretian Faux Micro-Epic (Book Thug, 2011) was short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, leading one Canadian commentator in the Globe and Mail to describe him as “an obscure, veteran poet with a history of being overlooked by the mainstream.” Le plus ça change . . . Both A Book of Uncertain and Uncertain Remains are forthcoming in 2022 from Spuyten Duyvil (New York) and BlazeVox (Buffalo), and the chapbook In the shadows recently appeared from above/ground press. A collection of essays — Measure’s Measures — Literary Assays — is also due out from Station Hill Press (Barrytown, NY) this spring. From 2014 to 2018 he audited the online turmoil called Dispatches from the Poetry Wars with co-conspirator, Kent Johnson. 

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan