A broadcast of our non-existence, which terrifies others, comes through the Radio of Wet Clay & writes itself in my notebook. About the future distinguished—not by its undecidedly analog or digital construction—but from this present, living future (no, not precisely living; the word would be adjective)—it is said, that it risks going forward without an eternity of waiting for this long moment, flowers growing inward, ears of corn listening to the sun for a sign of salt in the waves beneath the warehouse, blue flowers sensitized to the body, spinning webs of air throughout the body of text. This neither false nor abrasive certainty of invasion from without by an entity at war with vengeance and familiar with its double, titled Personality, lodges itself between signs that announce themselves with wisdom and veneration to the absent attendant in the tower from which the now indecipherable broadcast emanates. The letters scrape themselves against the sand.
Eliot Cardinaux is a poet, pianist, composer, and translator working at the edges of the lyric and improvised music. The author of On the Long Blue Night (Dos Madres, 2023), and the trio of Quiet Labor, Toy Elegy, and This Music From Another Room (Bodily Press, 2024), he has also produced over a dozen albums of original music, including, most recently, Imminence, with percussionist Gary Fieldman. He holds a Bachelor’s in Music from The New England Conservatory, and an MFA in Poetry from UMass Amherst. Cardinaux’s poems and translations have appeared in Jacket2, Meridian, California Quarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, Spoon River Poetry Review, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. He has toured extensively in the U.S. and Europe. He has taught literature and writing at UMass Amherst, and works as a bookseller at present, at Amherst Books. He is the founding editor/producer of an independent poetry imprint & record label, The Bodily Press.
Image: physics.stackexchange.com
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