where is the river :: a poetry experiment

Faizal Deen :: from He Ancestral, a novel-in-verse Jake Syersak :: from These Ghosts / This Compost: An Aubadeclogue Sheila E. Murphy :: Four poems Daniel Pravda :: Two poems Julia Polyck-O'Neill :: Four poems Sean Braune :: Four poems

SEMI-LOST IN CAROLINA No snow yet but the ground white with leftovers of the cotton harvest. Tornado of blackbirds in the low sky, I drive deserted US 13 south to ol’ T-Bone’s in Greenville. Cops stop me: there’s a chemical spill near Ahoskie, have to backtrack through Ghostville on 32, sunblind across the Chowan River Bridge. Seep into back country afternoon. Bear clawed pine trees. Stone crosses in cut fields. Time piled on itself like six-foot tractor tires in a horse stall. Vine pall over tall tobacco barn. Never seen so many hunters, guns strapped to their blaze-orange backs, hip boots, beer pockets, spitting wad juice at hounds whooping from pick-up truck cages, hoping winter will waste away with bourbon, venison and deer jerky. I slow for a spotted-head farmer limping the long gravel to the dented mailbox.   Antebellum antiques store, closed. Bojangle’s next to a shoebox post office. Dogs chasing along white, three-plank fences.   There's a thirty-acre field in ...

A New Routine Resume vivace. Find the cup To ripen space. Alleviate, Revive. Untie the stitched Warped to weakness.   Maybe anybody busy Hurtling toward the unplanned Finish line evaporates intact. Who knows who cares?   Dominoes reputed to effect Downturn may be rumors Only skittled in a curve Not named. Apply your name?   How do you want to be Recalled, if at all? For slumber, or no waves, For thick vast summer sprawl?       Naivete   All of a sudden destination’s lost to destiny. What lived within a frame has fallen from the hasps perhaps imagined. He introduces a new name, the locus of adventure. Who is she what has she done why does she live? He has a story not yet made. I hear it for the first time if he speaks. An attractive nuisance shapes itself in view. There is nothing more to do but linger and admit the loss. His thought dialing new number after number. Stretch not to reach, just stre...

Augury (for Cixous) That the body ripens The sugars, juices augur a burst (an attempt) Occupy more than two states at once, nonbinary & multiple The conditions dynamic, seams threatening to give way, giving way freely   Theory does not come before, to inspire Words do not precede, do not dictate My parents met in the mountains, in a Gold Rush museum That’s why my pulse sounds like a pocket full of coins The rules change every time I advance It’s rigged and I am too shy to abandon the pursuit I ought to say, once and for all, a certain number of banalities or truisms But I hold my words in my mouth like an egg, delicate – biological     Dreamt that I could reach up and touch the moon Gather foil-wrapped stars, place in ornamental bowls Come to hate my face Longing for something rooted, below surfaces Tyrants, despots, dictators, capitalism, all that forms the visible political space for us Is only the visible and theatri...

HEADS HUNTING MEN dark in latrines fugitives Foreskin phantoms index fingerling catches fire Sita’s choka spits stolen Cantino’s White things:           “FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL SULTAN CHA CHA” blasted! knocking they arrive the old men who have been to Mecca                                     BEWARE   OF DOG                                                 Mom sent Mireille out for more plasters. Just in case. “Where will Mr. Photon venture first, once freed from?” How’s your Vulgar body? “wizard beards cup their han...