The dawn is the opposite direction.
Follow the lacy trails through the valley of doom.
I dim from the outside & quiver on the inside.
Siren sounds from the bog.
Flamadiddle, Long Roll, Ratamacue.
Swollen glimmers, bewildered chickens.
We met in a tasting parlor.
Stonecrop, scotch broom, willets.
Sentence without verbs.
Amber light radiates from turnpike.
Scratchy cough, fever aches.
Weather insurance is an untapped marketplace.
Questions of culpability are often both foreground and background in my discussions about writing trauma with Rusty Morrison.* They emerge because I’m working on a book of connected poems that explore trauma’s antecedents and legacies, its truths and untruths. I use the writing itself as a means to question how one’s traumas emerge from, and merge with, the emergencies erupting all around us— climate, cultural crises, much more.
The dawn is the opposite direction.
Follow the lacy trails through the valley of doom.
I dim from the outside & quiver on the inside.
Siren sounds from the bog.
Flamadiddle, Long Roll, Ratamacue.
Swollen glimmers, bewildered chickens.
We met in a tasting parlor.
Stonecrop, scotch broom, willets.
Sentence without verbs.
Amber light radiates from turnpike.
Scratchy cough, fever aches.
Weather insurance is an untapped marketplace.
Questions of culpability are often both foreground and background in my discussions about writing trauma with Rusty Morrison.* They emerge because I’m working on a book of connected poems that explore trauma’s antecedents and legacies, its truths and untruths. I use the writing itself as a means to question how one’s traumas emerge from, and merge with, the emergencies erupting all around us— climate, cultural crises, much more.
on the emergence of blackgirl spirit form
+ the discovery of inner wisdom
BY REELAVIOLETTE BOTTS-WARD
i often stare
at how fire
dances, and
wonder if
ever i could
be that free
i often notice
what wind does
to tree, and
wonder if she’s
fighting or
dancing. i be
moving my body
like art in my mirror
making play thing
out my own skin
making graceful
out the clumsy
hips of me. i be
a binding of various journal entries on the power of generational knowledge, healing, and coping
Vethea Cerna Cole
I’ve started to think making art is like owning a polo horse, or buying a Lamborghini in the midst of a recession. I’ll be editing a video and have this moment where I’m staring at Premiere Pro, and think: Christ, this is so stupid. Am I really editing and re-editing this same 30 seconds of footage when there are so many actual problems in the world? Did my grandmother survive a famine for this?
is a subtle swirling viscosity surrounding you & me
always or only the ‘always’ I know as this life
dust is the cohesion & creates coherence between us
dust of what all of us are & have been or at least
this planet’s numinous phenomenal ‘all of us’ as such
its consistency heightens my facility to sense
the dead
whom I can’t recognize without allowing for
what will become of me
Earlier this year, I started corporate poetry as an exploration into how corporate language related to that other corpora that is our body.** Through a series of interactive “rooms,” this work aimed to repurpose the language of a variety of familiar online forms and platforms (Google Forms, Survey Monkey, Zoom and Qualtrics, among others) in order to domesticate the neoliberal intent of these data gathering technologies.
(These days, I laugh in short, quick bursts. My brother’s always sending me dad jokes: I be preaching on Amazon, call me Prime Minister)
Most of my research focuses on contemporary BIPOC poets who do weird shit on the internet, with loopers, recording devices; poets who make choirs with odd instruments; poets who construct sonic geographies for the Ancestors to travel through and visit with us.
I haven’t read a book in weeks. I spend all my reading hours glued to my phone. By the time I am done scrolling words, I feel motion sickness. My right thumb is sort of numb too. When I was a teenager I would go to my friend’s house and play Street Fighter until I got blisters. I am not one for originality, so you can safely guess it was thumb blisters for Ryu, Ken, or Chun-Li. I have been traveling on my screen of news since the pandemic started and I don’t even recall when that was.
Poetry and the Senses has launched! This program has been in development since October of 2019 following the most generous grant in ARC’s history, courtesy of the Engaging the Senses Foundation. The two-year initiative kicked off this January and will continue throughout the year.
