For Terence Winch & Ivan Sokolov
●
Debby Harry listed as “someone you may know” on Facebook. The squirrel freezes along the trunk of the tree, barely breathing until the hawk soars off. The rot in Lenin’s tomb starts to bloom. She finds an empty pill bottle in the compost. The stanza begins elegant, ends sloppy.
I eat words.
Sweet smell of skunk. Layered leaves of the woods. Thoreau in the burbs. The return to monarchy is upon us. One dollar, one vote. Pirates return to the coast of the Carolinas. A cartel is a business model. Ghost Guns R Us.
A cool morning in late Spring, the heat will come later. Did Vivian Maier ever date? The violence of the imagination. The catastrophe has begun to accelerate. Boxing up books in hopes that we can find another house. A banana with a particularly strong aftertaste.
Davy Crockett dies defending slavery. How small do you want the carrots? Fisher-Price Guillotine. Slicing beets. Wardle’s word hurdle addles the abled. She’s got no one, he says of his impending widow, oh her mother’s still alive, 95 and horrible, so that’s minus one. A cloud to the south opens in the mouth.
Mickey Mouse visits the mosque. Try to convey as-thoughness. A truck pulls up, carrying huge plastic containers of water. The fly pauses on the bread crust. The depressed detective invariably has a brilliant, beautiful daughter who will be put at risk before the last episode. Chin music. The Fuller Brushman arrives with a fuller brush.
A door slams in an empty house. A white goat in a suburban backyard. Joseph Beuys’ cheekbones. Joseph Beuys’ hat. Coyote in Central Park looks out at the Dakota. Spectacles on a windowsill. The Upper East Side is true wilderness. Someone is shouting down the canyons of the financial district but it’s 5:17 a.m. Dear Chris, hello.
●
My mother comes home from her date with both eyes blackened. He spent decades as a foreman, never invited in to “real” management. Calgary in those days was little more than a cow town. They photograph her in the park reading Ulysses. The president used his body like an old man so that it was more sad than sexy. Mexican baseball. The reason nobody ever figured out who took the shot from the grassy knoll was that he was dead by sunset, Oswald by noon the next day.
We are climbing Jacob’s bladder. Power in Denmark. Matilda was forever Tillie. Within a matter of weeks, the crew of the USS Merriwether is distributing relief supplies to the survivors in Nagasaki. Two of the boys didn’t make it to adulthood. They held Buddy’s wake in a shrimp shack. Santa’s Workshop. 2022: the logo of the Richland High School Bombers is a mushroom cloud. If I shave this beard, I will be staring at my grandfather.
My glasses steam up the instant I put them on. Planet in hospice. Watching the flood obliterate the highway. Fan in the attic makes a quiet hum. His obit makes no mention of a partner.
1670: Peter Lely paints Margaret Hughes with her left breast exposed. Othello was no Clarence Thomas. Gin and tonics atop the credenza. The real Long Dong Silver dies of AIDS. Ruperta’s fate fixed by her mother’s gambling.
Not the blue puffballs, but the perfect purple parasols hovering above the hydrangea garden. Trigon days. Small, medium, cactus. When a man writes of nudity it is not the same. Not duck/rabbit but burst of flowers/grimacing mole. What she calls gray divorce: he simply prefers to live in Germany, and she doesn’t mind the freedom. Joined canvas.
I sat on the rug and watched my father have sex with this strange woman. Steam arises from the orange pot. Wheelbarrow half full of rain. They are at, but not in, the pool. Somewhere down the hill an infant articulates displeasure. Forty years later they stayed with us on their way to the south of France. To fly, a pilot must accept the materiality of the sky.
Dim day divides. Dear I/Not I. So much depends upon the church’s will to inherit. Civilization built on a lie. Whatever others you. Burning down the house. B’rer Rabbit comes for Emmitt Till. A quartet more strong than the Bea’les, dead babies of Birmingham. Dead Kennedys. Dear Angela Davis, about that angel in your name. 600 cops surrounded the house and began shooting and did not stop until it had burned to the ground. The ironically named mayor, Wilson Goode, left office to become a preacher. The name of Tom Hanks’ volleyball. The name Africa.
●
Everything changes. In court, capital trumps democracy. The wick sputtering. The people united has never ever happened. Mao was serious when he thought you have to destroy the intellectuals. The small girl gasped to see the size of the library. Disobedience, Milton counselled, and the fruit thereof. Crooked cucumber.
Day breaks, leaving debris. She feels him inside of her, poking around. If the musical is sad, it’s an opera. Thunderstorm that never came. In front of the books on each shelf, small pottery. Trying to phantom where I might be, the descent beckons. A neighbor 73 years younger than I.
One who buffs. He was born, the Canadian says, in central Turkey, his wife further to the east. Calls the deer antelope. Not yet yearlings. Roy Cohn works hard to execute the Rosenbergs. No one remembered Ronald Coleman even then. The governor’s handshake lacked vigor. A sunny day in Newport, Rhode Island.
Dancing on the Titanic. One knife just for tomatoes. So the trick is to control the ammunition. Bicycling through Helsinki. They fuck in the back of the pickup at the edge of the strip mall lot. The wren is meticulous, building his nest. Boater’s floaters, cat or moraine. Before it was an Italian restaurant, this place was a diner, and before that a gun shop, bullet holes up high in the corner by the door to the kitchen. Wondering if ink bleeds into my pocket.
Fishhooks through nipples. Colorism at black sites. The narrative through which Nelly McMahon is pregnant though unmarried in the year 1890. Having arrived in the muddy urbanism of San Francisco in the early 1870s, John Franklin Tansley moves again east, maybe ten miles across the bay, to the conglomeration of small villages that will soon enough congeal into Oakland.
Flush out the paragraph. Geats become Goths, but the Danes remain. Burgess Collins arrives at Hanford after my parents have left for El Sobrante. Whalen gone already from The Dalles, Bev Dahlen a toddler. Eddie Symmes has long since disappeared into his persona. A high-pitched stutter that never quite goes away. Of the 44, just three remain.
The algorithms are bright tonight. Leaves the dish towel atop the stove. Fiat Lax.
●
Mild in July, yet humid. Sound is specific. The microwave door. A glass moved sideways over the counter. Barefoot steps up the stairs. My knee instead of an onion. Three analog clocks I never set in motion. Analog cocks.
Every face is an emergency. The roomful of skulls beneath the chapel. Cold case DNA. Nothing here to separate out Nelly McMahon’s mysterious stranger. A lone tooth from the 43 missing students. Video of a headless corpse hung by its ankles, legs splayed, doused in petrol then set ablaze. Their daughter was simply never heard from again.
He tells me, as he does every time we talk, that his son has died. I shake the beans into the grinder. The backup takes hours. The rough desert terrain of my skull. There is only one person on the entire beach, a young woman sunbathing nude by the edge of the water, so she removes her own clothes and goes to stand over her, blocking her sun until the sunbather opens her eyes and looks up. Wan car why?
[This line has been removed for study]
The neck bends forward. The muscle behind the right knee that pushes the gas pedal. My left hand, holding this tablet. Eroded moonscape of the eye. Walking not on her toes. Not one cloud in the sky.
In the morning, a last glass of red wine remains on the table. A hard drive retains all. Why else would Oswald have shot the officer? Shadow letters mark the unwritten. If you tip it, the wine will spill and the glass may break. The trees offer their form to the birds.
Broken sentence. Water and the logic of gravity. I can see the damage everywhere. Start writing, drag files or start from a template. Meeting my dog in my driveway. Naked man with chickens.
●
Hydrangeas blanch before they fade. For 20 years, Americans are governed by three presidents born within 12 weeks of one another right at the very beginning of the Baby Boom. “Same war, different army,” Arkadii laughed tho in fact my dad went to sea. A spark is what killed him. The Tenderloin Times published in English, Vietnamese, Cambodian and Lao. I shook Ronald Reagan’s hand.
The ice maker’s song. Checking the urine in the bowl for color and clarity. Point at which I terrified my grandmother. The trees in full bloom. Hum in my head that never stops but will change key if I think of it. A period feels abrupt.
Silence of the limbs. My anxiety. This house lacks good bones. Nowhere to walk. A man who prefers the doors of the cabinets shut. Middle state, middle child.
Bowling ball in a vacant lot. Instantaneous is a five-syllable word. Republik Indonesia stamp of a ketjak performance scotch-taped crookedly to the bottom of the screen. Red paper dot whose purpose is to remind me to breathe. Reflection of the sky above the rooftop of the neighbor’s house.
Strategy of the morning dump. Hannah’s letters (meaning not her correspondence). The period understood as kin to a chef’s knife. The shortstop’s toss behind his back. The centerfielder going up at the warning track in slomo. The sound of the crowd on mute.
Base vs. superstructure, base vs. mound. Leg vs. lap. Verse vs. verses. Hearses rehearse. The body in fact is not the plan but rather a poor copy with the materials at hand. The children dance in a circle.
Loitering munitions. The far end of the house. In an inside pocket of his sheepskin vest, a pocket I’m certain doesn’t really exist, he or I had stuffed a dozen Verso volumes, as notable for the bright colors of their covers as for their compact uniform size. Mr Bates, you have a lovely mother. My bladder my gut my knees my self.
●
My dry eye. Bone against bone. What precisely is a midge?
Kicking wildly in her sleep. The bitter economist. The metaphor of folders, of files. One zero one. I walk in the dark to the second bathroom. Across the street, the light in the bedroom that is never off.
Next roll of the die. Recycled life. I hear European broadcasters struggle with the word Yosemite. Hem, as he often referred to himself, left his periods dangling, one space after the end of one sentence, one before the next. Will text messaging have as much impact, say, as the book? Every picture on that wall leans slightly to the right.
Ah paragraph, ah line. What nameless mite died at the center margin of this page? Infinitely smaller ones scamper as my eye scans this print. Sound of the blank space. No period is silent. Hiding there at the end of the line.
Stress for less. I wake to the realization that I am being hunted. Not for the first time, thank you, Nancy Ling Perry. The sprinkler on overnight, although the heatwave is over. Green green hose of home. Ed Montgomery, whom Wikipedia calls a “water carrier for the FBI,” showed up in class on career day. It’s a poem, Eric.
The left side of the body crumbles first. A bruise where no bruise exists. Sun before sun. The keyboard without order. The road appears damp, a tablecloth in the garden soaked. Two hours west of Seattle, an hour west of Philadelphia. Finns don’t jaywalk. Little green light at the bottom of the speaker. A semi es el. That summer Ray Charles was the thing.
An echo this morning of Sheryl Crow: If it makes you coffee. Grown vs. groan, wch one? Shower’s sound through walls is a mode of static. Downstairs, cubes tumble from an icemaker. Barefoot dancer walks on her heels.
Ron Silliman has written and edited 56 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 19 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his hometown of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
Photo credit: Jeff Hurwitz
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 