I can’t remember why “boomerang” brings me so painfully into my own sights. The medicine has stopped nothing, nor was it intended to. These twin jars of split peas, I boil them for days. They will not soften, as I do. I try to work up the nerve to listen to some music. Is it so wrong to end a sentence with a pronoun? I haven’t licked a stamp for years, not with this tongue. You have to run to taste the wind, says my dog from his leash, says my friend from Orofino, to his. Chase the grass, then, in the wind down a long hill. Suffering is not, as it turns, its own schadenfreude. My friend stayed wrong about that. My stomach: still tender where she shot it, though I did not feel anything at the time. I felt nothing. It was quicker than the fall of an eyelash. The beauty berry bushes have spread, and their day-glo fruit hangs in bends throughout the forest. Words that matter can’t be words.
Further Reading
JOHN LATTA’S RESPONSE TO “SOME DARKER BOUQUETS”
Examens Négatifs: A Roster Incompleat Of course what is duly (and dully) lacking in poetry-reviewing (genus norteamericano) is the sublime (awe-striking) negative: it resides in (and emerges out of) the rhubarb and hubbub of regular, aggressively independent, and bravely committed engagement (and retaliatory exchange) with the contemporary (increasingly international) scene, a poking into all the various corners of […]
Arshile Gorky in Las Vegas
by Arne Weingart
You painted Las Vegas before it ever existed. I bet you never thought anyone would take abstract expressionism so literally. Such gaudy fantasies taken to impossible extremes by no taste and money. It’s your kind of town. Why else would your self-portrait end up in The Guggenheim Gallery located just off the reception lobby of […]
32, BLUE by Michael Barach
32 Blue . . . In the backyard I say hike, drop two steps back, and wait with my elbow cocked and the youth football our father bought us for Hanukkah grazing my ear. In school I held a conch shell that echoed ocean sounds in its spiral corridor, and in the football I listen […]
