Month: August 2021

ransom

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Ransom
–Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

The payment always has to be in kind;
easy to forget, traveling in safety,
until the demand comes in.

Do not think him unkind, but begin
to search for the stuff he will accept.
It is not made easy:
a salmon, a marten-skin, a cow’s horn,
a live cricket. Ants have helped me
to sort the millet and barley grains.
I have washed bloodstains from the enchanted shirt.

I left home early
walking up the stony bed
of a shallow river, meaning to collect
the breast-feathers of thousands of little birds
to thatch a house and barn.
It was a fine morning, the fields
spreading out on each side
at the beginning of a story,
steam rising off the river.
I was unarmed, the only bird
a lark singing out of reach:
I looked forward to my journey.

Photo by Niranjan Venkatesh on Unsplash

importation

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Importation of Landscapes
–Alan Dugan

Photo by Zane Lee on Unsplash

scalar

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Scalar
–Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

1

You can rise to a level of not knowing that’s untouched by entropy.

Out of uncertainty, openness: order is maintained.

You rise to a realization beyond decay.

There’s a deeper intelligence than that.

It radiates like light across a border between quanta and matter, unifying them.

Your physical body and your quantum body of probabilities are like two candles on a table.

Space between them evenly fills with photons of light, no separation at the particle level.

You carry one candle outside and hold it up against a background of stars.

Space between candle and a star fills with waves that bind them; each star’s as connected to it as the one inside.

Look at your candle, then look at Sirius; photons from each hit your retina and electrochemically flash.

You’re another flame or star in the surrounding interconnected field.

Yet, what is the structure of this connectedness?

The field is your light and not knowing simultaneously, local light.

You observe sky’s dimensions according to our consensus on entropy.

You don’t see the unifying factor in all things; you can’t perceive the enfoldment of chance and fatigue.

2

Time also enfolds.

Your present state may not relate to what’s past, but to a more fundamental structure, like a pool of widening rings from a stone.

This moment cuts through the physical universe now and seems to hold all of space in itself.

What happens today may be altered by an event in the future, since space consists of ambiguous, foggy regions, where a particle may pass on your last day.

Awareness creates the duration you experience.

If you try to divide duration, it’s like suddenly passing a gold blade through the flame.

You divide space you think time occupies, not motion itself.

Imagine duration as non-referential time, change, and freedom from the decay inevitably implied.

You observe creative emergence.

Growth indicates intelligence of the universe as a whole in space you measure as your heart beating new content, new time.

3

I can’t distinguish duration that separates two instants from my memory that connects them.

Duration continues what has passed with now; it implies consciousness, for which time flows.

Brain steps down energy radiating from stars through optic nerve to pineal gland and arranges these myriad photons into a neurological, space-time grid.

It conveys the influx of light as a field, mentality.

So thought is a form of organized light.

Non-physical variables, my wish, intent, expectance also create and transcribe energy.

Even if mind never operates as slowly as the speed of starlight, your future dwells gracefully in the space of your imagining.

4

A body or galaxy requires continuous energy to maintain, like a whirlpool in a fast stream.

The spiral flow persists, though water constantly moves in and out of it.

A standing wave of photons comprises the immanent grid of starlight that permeates space; and vice versa, emanations from earth, sun, your nervousness and emotion radiate out.

You observe this enigmatic dark energy, where every point in space contains intersecting photons from every star, past and present.

Zero-sum, immense creativity streams through you, gyre of light as intelligence or your intent to observe.

The observation is grainy; people, dogs, trees are mosaics, a crystalline lattice of interacting bits; each “decides” countless times per second whether to leap to the next moment.

Light, information, so activated composes a body in the process of coalescence, outcrop of growing, infinite fields.

Nurture the belief that your body’s infused with deep intelligence of this information, whose sole purpose is to sustain you.

5

Add to four dimensions inner space, mind, the virtual.

All objects connect, for example, through meaning in hyperspace.

Our plans for the future exist as images, and these cognitive structures are also in hyperspace, since mind is more like a spatial concept.

What we call star lines, like songs, ley-lines are the interconnectivity.

There’s no need to decide what’s true; reality’s a learning curve.

Then, he tells me about his pictures of stars and galaxies; he projects himself into space, taking with him a 35 mm. camera.

He puts the lens to his forehead and photographs the sun, moon, Milky Way, Andromeda.

He has many boxes of these images.

To commune, deepest process of space, evolves toward more connection, complexity.

When I look at night sky, I touch inner space with heaven; plasma streams across borders.

Time is not blackness through which light travels, more like plasma.

Consciousness embodies it by acting self-referentially, not dualistically as in seeing, not seeing.

Through emotional attraction, mass affinity, tachyonic speed, we know bodies and radiance are interwoven; what we call originary is instant.

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

dear –

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Dear —
–Donika Kelly

We come from abundance, each season
bowed with rain. But here is the earth,
eager to flame, the air like salt, thirsty
even for the water we carry
in our skin. New wanderers in this land,
we do not know how to wait for water,
have never waited so long for rain
that every tree died, left to stand tinder.

For now, I watch the shoulder burn,
drive through the smoke that blots the mountains,
and holds the old yolk of sun. I know nothing
of fire, its reach, its spread, know only
that every body makes its own ash,
manages its own diminishing.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

an excerpt

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*
–Claudia Rankine

Photo by Dima Pechurin on Unsplash

something bright, then holes

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Something Bright, Then Holes
–Maggie Nelson

I used to do this, the self I was
used to do this

the selves I no longer am
nor understand.

Something bright, then holes
is how a girl, newly-sighted, once

described a hand. I reread
your letters, and remember

correctly: you wanted to eat
through me. Then fall asleep

with your tongue against
an organ, quiet enough

to hear it kick. Learn everything
there is to know

about loving someone
then walk away, coolly

I’m not ashamed
Love is large and monstrous

Never again will I be so blind, so ungenerous
O bright snatches of flesh, blue

and pink, then four dark furrows, four
funnels, leading into an infinite ditch

The heart, too, is porous;
I lost the water you poured into it

Photo by Michael Fenton on Unsplash

 

a serious morning

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A Serious Morning
–Andrei Codrescu

being serious is a
perversion of natural form
an extension of a bruised baby hand
behind which towers the tilted needle
of a dim father’s body.
and the bees of his eyes dying with contempt.
i’m awash with the serious tools
of a mysterious trade.
the hushed windows of my receding house.
the power lines humming death wishes.
the dry wines in the palm of the hand.
if i were to laugh my ass off at all this
i would take up
a form of politics that ends
with a cheerleader licking the wounds
of my machine gunned body

Photo by wonho kim on Unsplash

pennsylvania

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Pennsylvania
–Natalie Shapero

Other children, when I was a child,
would at times invoke the inner light—

I misunderstood.

I thought it meant God scorches
within us, and God, like a torch,
can go out. That was so long ago.
I’ve since ceased my believing in death—

there’s no such thing.

There’s only a kind of brownout,
the whole of the globe turning

off for a moment, then shuddering
back, the same as it was,

except one person short.

And then before long, an utter new
person is born. Somebody worse.

Photo by I on Unsplash

The Vanishing World

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The Vanishing World
–Sandra Lim

Photo by Samuel McGarrigle on Unsplash

a slip of paper

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A Slip of Paper
–Louise Glück

Today I went to the doctor—
the doctor said I was dying,
not in those words, but when I said it
she didn’t deny it—

What have you done to your body, her silence says.
We gave it to you and look what you did to it,
how you abused it.
I’m not talking only of cigarettes, she says,
but also of poor diet, of drink.

She’s a young woman; the stiff white coat disguises her body.
Her hair’s pulled back, the little female wisps
suppressed by a dark band. She’s not at ease here,

behind her desk, with her diploma over her head,
reading a list of numbers in columns,
some flagged for her attention.
Her spine’s straight also, showing no feeling.

No one taught me how to care for my body.
You grow up watched by your mother or grandmother.
Once you’re free of them, your wife takes over, but she’s nervous,
she doesn’t go too far. So this body I have,
that the doctor blames me for—it’s always been supervised by women,
and let me tell you, they left a lot out.

The doctor looks at me—
between us, a stack of books and folders.
Except for us, the clinic’s empty.

There’s a trap-door here, and through that door,
the country of the dead. And the living push you through,
they want you there first, ahead of them.

The doctor knows this. She has her books,
I have my cigarettes. Finally
she writes something on a slip of paper.
This will help your blood pressure, she says.

And I pocket it, a sign to go.
And once I’m outside, I tear it up, like a ticket to the other world.

She was crazy to come here,
a place where she knows no one.
She’s alone; she has no wedding ring.
She goes home alone, to her place outside the village.
And she has her one glass of wine a day,
her dinner that isn’t a dinner.

And she takes off that white coat:
between that coat and her body,
there’s just a thin layer of cotton.
And at some point, that comes off too.

To get born, your body makes a pact with death,
and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat—

You get into bed alone. Maybe you sleep, maybe you never wake up.
But for a long time you hear every sound.
It’s a night like any summer night; the dark never comes.

 

Photo by Brandi Redd on Unsplash