by Ron Silliman

l

So much depends
upon

the first violin
glazed by

three oboes
beside

the white
cellist

When the moon hits your brain
and it’s starting to rain
that’s free–market land use:
whose father is that, asleep on the flattened cardboard box under
the convention center awning, blue paper Covid mask gently
stirring with his breath? In Guerneville (silent e), under the
bridge, the war in Nam is lost every night. Social distancing at the
crack park. George Washington sent the sick all the way to Yellow
Springs to keep the troops at the Forge from getting infected.
Durante sings Dylan.

2

Racism predates capitalism, but capital — like the church — puts it
to work.

My grandfather’s great grandfather signs ’is name with an X. Out
of what bog on which island & how begot & by whom? You
meaning me? Like a bet I made, that I’d see 45. Not him, the year.
Scream or screen, wch one? Not a beat cop but a dispatcher:
location location location. When this you see, GED.

3

N word
Enward

As if the language
were about to collapse
in on itself
at the center
Furious perhaps
at the idea
(what’s an idea?)
of signing a Kenyan
to play the Nigerian Ifemelu
How Americanah is that?
How Charlie Chan?

4

It was only a matter of time, once the lockdown began,
before there’d be riots in the streets,
whacked plot against the governor of Michigan
a nation designed to fail the Marshmallow Test.

Colorism in India, in Africa, in Nawleans

All about ultraviolet

Just like the queens in the back room at Stonewall,
once Buttigieg & Klobuchar pulled out, centrists had nowhere
else to go.
Which is the donut, which the cup of coffee? You meaning me?

5

Only a matter of time
eight minutes 46 seconds
calculated at the base of the neck

It was capitalists who heard the whole phrase: Workers of the
world. A home for global engagement.
Power invariably lies elsewhere, like mercury sliding under the
door.

White people? No such thing.
McKay in Marseille, say hey!
You meaning me?

The essence of a demand is that it cannot be met: Defund the
police. Bad cop, no donut.

6

Race is the modality
thru wich class is experienced

Stuart Hall

No women in the family were permitted to drive, to learn how to
drive, until my grandfather died. My aunt understood class
abandonment, marrying a real estate developer her father’s age,
becoming a school librarian, living out where transit simply didn’t
exist. The last recipient of the Civil War Widows & Orphans
Fund did not die until 2020. Time stretched as though over a
drumhead. I did not understand until I was ten that the N word
was something people would have feelings over, that it wasn’t in
fact polite.

Albany was not carved out initially to trigger spatial segregation
(though that’s what it became) but because the dynamite works
feared codes in a municipality whose core voting bloc might be
university faculty. Hagley Creek, but a tributary of the
Brandywine, where they called it (earlier iteration of that same
process) gunpowder mills, three–sided brick buildings so the body
parts would blow out over the water. You can hear Champ &
Major barking.

When this you see, PTSD

7

I can see clearly now
my brain is gone
I can see all
grand juries
in my way
Money laundered before the dawn
is gonna pay
for the dacha
where I’ll stay

The oceans were a curse. Who speaks of the Great Belgian Novel
or the French frontier? We, on the other hand, plowed west,
killing everything in our path. Tombstone, Arizona.

by Robert Kelly

see,
abashed at all
our Spartan propaganda
(less is more; hurt helps)
the opulent evening
unfolds.
We see the silver
sprinkle us as rain,
asperges me, Domine,
we cry to the Lord
by which we mean the all,
the wise totality that rules us,
and we fall on our minds’ knees
the bones we call sleep.

2.
Then it was day.
The confused liturgies of dream
talked themselves out.
Anaphora, what we repeat.
Wake renewed from the same old dark.
So now it is day,
soft and cool for the season,
the sky looks as if remembering
the storms of last night.
Yes, weather has a memory, too,
we see it in the trees too.

3.
Walk with me some day
through a few lines of Homer,
the most famous ones,
about this raging foreigner
who came to wreck a city,
helping other angry men
who had no city of their own.
Wreck the city and leave
food for the dogs and birds,
beasts who commonly eat
carrion or what they kill
now given by those angry men
dinners of luxurious fresh meat.
pf boys and men, blond and brown,
bodies spread on the blood–soaked ground.
Angry men from Europe
who come to sack a city in Asia —
sound familiar
Even history has enough sense
to call the book Iliad, the poem
about Troy, not some weird
Achileid. No wonder Alexander
had it carried into battle,
help the angry man defeat society.

4.
Forgive the lecture,
I was just looking out the window
when it began. Sorry,
morning should be lesson enough.

5.
Sometimes one squirms
out of dream into something worse:
rational thinking without feeling.
That too is where war starts,
and detention camps fill up
along our borders, dumps
for children with the wrong color hair.

6.
Of course I forgive you,
you didn’t mean it —
but that should make me madder
than if you did.
You should at least know
what you’re doing
whatever you do.
Sprinkle me, o Lord, with consciousness.

7.
This is me still
trying to wake up.
Thousands of years
deep all sleep seems,
and every day a pure naissance,
nothing again about it.

8.
I love using words
like ebery and all,
they’re easy to spell
and make you mad,
make you search
fast for exceptions,
objections, tear holes
in my plausible absolutes.
That way you get to share the work,
striving along the road with me
to find what language means.

9.
Means today, I mean,
not some old book
I try to understand.
Today is an epic of its own,
we stumble through
its lean hexameters
wondering what dialect
we’re in this time.
Is this a line by Homer?
A haiku? Each has 17 syllables,
how can we know
what anything is
until we see what comes next.
Look far out to sea,
your eyes are better than mine,
what color are the sails
on that schooner on the horizon?
Or is that an osprey
settling on a much closer wave?

May 2021

by Carl Little

I don’t follow unless you mean
Auntie in casket, wearing
glasses she never wore alive
disturbing a perfectly fine
wizened visage and eyes
that shone even when you
commented on the weather.

Once a deer leapt
through Auntie’s windshield —
she survived.
Another time she took a bite
of mom’s shepherd’s pie
hot from oven
and went face down in her plate —
We thought she’d died,

but she lived a lot longer,
until 1979, age 89,
interred at Oak Grove Cemetery
after the viewing
where those glasses
caught me off guard,
thinking how useless they’d be
where Auntie and all of us
were headed.

by Sophia Kidd

were a woman
standing in a
risen
field

cut cornstalks
in rows
around her

is she wearing
an a–line
how low
is her hem

how long
her hair
the sound
of her voice