O Pen the State/open the say/ate the stated
We are always one link from disaster
blinking the clouds top
the mountains like thought
bubbles from the earth
with a silhouette of a person
crossing above the road
some wearing a reality
backdrop/terminus and
beginning/eventually
the body forgets how to swallow
the mirror in every eye
shaving
reality drops
behind its work zone sign
blinking cream true
what roots we bury
do runners believe
as they edge along the fields
geese roped to the sky
a pitch toward
its beginning and terminus
the body crosses above
a freeway hovering not
walking really clouds drop
back from themselves
capping the disappearance
from which version
of the mountainous earth
no longer thinking in pale
and paler puffs above ground
below how we run together
through this distant setting
toward any ending
be it work in the dirt
in all our lungs languages
a rising felt when we quieted
the water tanks
with our guns full and them
air filled things in our chest
cavities it has become
morning a cave
loud against all this
judgement of places
and shapes the trains
bowl past us
little wheels in their minds
heaving through time
stop another setting
for a storm a castle for
the curves we swear our bodies
won’t inhabit when empty
the dead trees shadow
and reappear
against the mountain
lumber sign
a sigh in smoke
and the shape of planks
of many buildings
us heaving back against
the wood in piles like it’s
simply a backdrop
not something once
living we play our parts
again the shadow of a form
crossing above us
and the dirt of
our bodies below
A blooming of night jasmine in your sinus cavity
this is what’s wrong with America a series of
cracks in the pavement and the pavement itself
ghosts don’t recognize letters or names or the smells
associated with the sounds our bodies make
a bruise in the night doesn’t look like anything
aside from crying when the rent is due we put
our checks in our mouths and ask forgiveness
the later hours are not going to remember what
penance was paid to flowers or how another
season arrived wearing its shawl of rain or lack
calling each form by its diminutive each hole
by the shape needed to conduct its completion
a symphony of unnamable things in our periphery
you can almost see your way through a tunnel
before the structure gives up
The pain that you thought was owed or you owned
or is coming should be worn draped over the edges
is there in others in you is there already this world
wait and it will be gone
When we wear our grief gowns and hair in mats
and the dirt in our shoes files it’s grievances for
our feet being atop it
when we swear our allegiances to the weather
inside the walls we draw and color in with fingers
so trembly they look like shadows
What whirled in the background was not an engine
was the end of something (a smoke) was the idea
of ‘being’ brought into the past and then nearly
forgotten how the mountain took itself out a while
with the water coursing through it—what the course
itself made and became—another word entire—who
says valley and looks to see the parts that are there
and not what isn’t
When we share the same experience with what
resemble others I am not imprinted with the hands
they halve the broken lines I swear if my wife disappears
I’ll die too and the way this happens is with time or if
I die too she’ll disappear from me but the mind
stings itself with possible turns that shouldn’t ever
be taken and how we try to sleep through the unknown
things we’re courting counting the sheep of our days
until they’ve reached the final letter in the final number
It’s not despair to know what might be coming but the world
outside mirrors the misspelled calm within. C writes about
pulling two pieces of what’s shattered together and who
knows what might stick to your skin. Shan talks of the virus
as glitter in the lungs from something she read and when
you breathe we all breathe it’s endless until it isn’t
Aside in predictive middle grounding
We can go anywhere and you
get the money from us now
we will get there to be a good
night to be there in a few
days so I’ll be back home in
a little while I can see you
later on this afternoon I’ll be
home soon as y’all get there
thanks again I’ll talk y’all
tomorrow I’ll see you soon
I’ll be sure y’all can probably
come back in the next couple
minutes or so I’ll call y’all when
y’all are careful love love and
love love you and love love
and miss y’all too
Thoughtcrimes is the size of a bottle
of wine coming
settled quickly can’t view anything
down for the cough cough
and cough kill us
some more time
beginning fruit
gold and haptic you
pit the fuse against the fever
and whatever comes back blown
is glass or the sand itself
The tight green feeling of possession. What color we set our heads
round and the noise of noises we make. I press arch and hear
the rock bellow. I press contour and feel the road shake.
It’s not that it’s easy to be a fiction, just better than
the boredom of a life lived already right
by the time you’ve reached it.
Some internal mixings.
You take what you remember
and wear it around until it breaks. Until
the bends in what could have happened did and
you’re another you now. That path quaked to its existential
collapse. If we say one word so many namy times. What can you
color all your feelings with. A cut bores its edges past the seam you thought
was your own edge and so you spill into another room and time does not recede then.
The peril we say is less if together
but do not know what it would mean
apart. So knowing is a kind of faith,
this. And whatever reality is green
and tight feeling is agreed upon
as those things and so we can share
portions of this world.
How when in a participatory mood the flecks of light become
our loosest skin, set upon each of us like plunder.
I’m under the impression someone says
and we watch the forest floor
recede from all
memorials.
All memory is
electrical substantiation. No
one could tell you and difference apart.
Your final defenses. The streets were aligned with
the other streets so. And we settle our bodies in them, winking
toward the supple meat they’ll become in someone
else’s dreams for us. As we can’t let
the thought escape before
it screens. What
is an essence.
Flood plain. What is
a dogma in the slip of a century’s
discs. From some distant perspective our
times will not even appear, so who gets busy being
born and dying. Root factory in the simple floor plan. Misting forms
among these thrummed house plants. If a seed were to shed
its compliance. If a mystery were to build a train
out of circular emotions we would be
riding our own backs
to the station.
Dig into the uncertainty of what love is or
does or how to make a pattern moan.
Excitement in the poured milk over eyes
of ranters, rangers. Strange the thigh
plant. How a chicken once and always
is a church to some. In this the mysteries
of reason. I’ve given up on how.
Mini-interview with Tony Mancus
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
TM: I don’t know if I have a good answer for this. Given the way my head works, there are lots of moments that are continually doing their work on me. Seeing the contrast between resorts and tin shacks along Baja California as a teenager, my son saying a pink kinetic sand snowman is probably a ghost, wondering at the construction of Midwinter Day, Jane Miller proclaiming “the I is dead” in a workshop, encountering Etheridge Knight’s work in college, growing up in a small former mining town and living away from that place in cities the rest of my life, hand binding runs of chapbooks, watching the lightning strike scatter/root structure of waterways from a plane window, doom scrolling twitter in bed next to my wife.
HFR: What are you reading?
TM: From the start of the pandemic until about 5 months ago, I had a hard time sitting with anything at all. But I was able to get back to somewhat regular reading recently. I have a tendency to read haphazardly and shuffling between several things. Right now it’s some year-end review stuff, and I just got Shelly Taylor’s new book B-SIDE GIRLS KNOCKIN’ SUGAR IN THE GOURD, and Jen Tynes’s chapbook Mushrooms Yearly Planner, Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest (just finished yesterday), Elisa Gabbert’s The Unreality of Memory, Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain, a book about our assumptions around good learning experiences called Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, Black Imagination curated by Natasha Marin, and a couple manuscripts from friends. Been trying to sit with narratives more lately.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “O Pen the State/open the say/ate the stated”?
TM: It started as a series of lines that popped into my head when I was driving to work on Route 93. It’s a really nice stretch of road along the front range. There were folks running and construction, someone on an overpass just outside of Boulder looked to be setting pace along the mountains. And then over the next several weeks I’d write into the document after making that drive. I only drove in twice a week and the rest of the time worked from home. It was right before and during the start of the pandemic. I’d take pictures of this one tree whenever I could manage to slow down enough. I think a lot of what’s in it is hung up in the split between perceptions—of value and want, of what’s abstracted from feeling and what’s felt as real and a lot of generalized but very tangible worry.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
TM: I’ve got a couple poetry manuscripts that I’m hacking at—some have been worked and reworked over longer stretches of time than I’d like to admit. Can’t seem to let them go to the dustpile. Getting back to chapbook making with Dan Brady for Barrelhouse. And I’ve returned to the draft materials for a nonfiction book about my uncle that I’m aiming to have a full draft of this coming year. It’s something that I’m terrified of getting wrong but need to get finished so I don’t have a semi-legitimate reason to hate myself. (Not really, but kind of.) Had an idea for an interactive bracket of quotes that would serve as a personality test of sorts, but don’t know if that’ll ever be a thing. Also trying to be a human in the world and a relatively reliable parent and partner and friend.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
TM: The news cycle will likely have folded this under by the time this is up, but a lot of land and homes burned a few days ago just to the east of the stretch of road that started this poem. They’re citing climate change (the Chinook winds were gusting up to 115mph and it had been the second driest 6 month stretch on record) and the expansion of population and housing in the Denver/Boulder metro area into what was formerly open space (Superior had a population of something like 250 in the early 90s and 13,000 people were evacuated from that township during the fires). My wife, Shannon, writes about climate change and narratives and we’re running up against all of the feared things that some folks have been shouting about for decades. She consistently points to the information deficit model as something that we should be working to remedy. It’s based in the assumption that shifting people’s beliefs about topics they are not expert in can be accomplished by directly communicating presenting information and facts. This approach proves inept in the face of people’s beliefs about what they know and what they think they know. What’s more effective is when people craft narratives and experiences that really hit close to home for the folks that need convincing. And I get that the market will wring whatever it can out of the sources that are feeding global warming and we’re on a path that isn’t leading toward real course correction or even effective mitigation, but from the basement where I work and in the home I rarely leave with a 2.5 year old child whose laughter and kindness reinforce some belief in the innate goodness of humans, I can’t help but hope that the pendulum swings back soon (for so many things) and that we reassess everything and come up with a different system. Because the one we’re in is well broken.
Tony Mancus is the author of a handful of chapbooks, including Apologies (Reality Beach), Bye Sea (Tree Light Books), and City Country (Seattle Review). His first full length collection will be published by The Magnificent Field. He works as an instructional designer, serves as chapbook editor for Barrelhouse, and lives with his wife, son, and cats in Colorado.
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