by Kate Colby

Wave theory of consciousness:

bends around the brain
to break on back shore —

an endless beach
littered with cairns.

Collecting empties there.

*

A threshold is also a point
of departure —

will my last breath
be in or out?

I write so that death
feels like enough

(crying straight
into my mouth).

by Kate Colby

A poem makes much
of what’s already in it

(“essentially” means
“deeply” or “all but”).

As swamp gas accounts
for visual phenomena

appurtenant to
the impossible:

words are fake
in fact of night,

their light the stars
won’t reach to meet.

“Leave off ” can mean
“stop” or “omit;”

a unicorn’s an animal,
a tricorn a hat;

the beginning of a corner is
as long as you face it.

by Richard Taylor

It was the low place that seemed unkind, the wall
foundered, the stones no longer snug
and holding for a partial mind at work.

The voids want fresh stones, and the mind knows
they rest abroad in another field. Once every summer
five torn loose and chewed by the glacier’s

dark tooth bark their single syllable hurt
at the mower’s blade. Otherwise the earth is coy
to a mind’s pry, but the bar muscles

into the hard thatched grass, by fists
of turf, teases a stone, each one all around,
intimate and slow, until they murmur

of primal rivers rounding, smoothing, and lever up
into the forgotten sun. They say their several weights,
their cousin shapes, accede to a mind in its gaps

that ache too much in a man alone with his only arms
before old Harald told me “Lay the barrow to a stone,
the stone rolls into the barrow’s hug, rights willingly

and wheels to the wall.” Now I’ll pillow them,
tuck them lovely and trigged, and true the partial mind
to a trim spine riding even on the meadow’s swell.

by Robert Hampson

who scatters teeth as tokens of the dead
so that the earth itself will testify
to those whose bodies have disappeared
in a future beyond this present time
who gives voice to these mute witnesses
the inks that fade the pages that decay
the distinctiveness of character forms
indications of class and circumstance
who carves letters into the soft paper
infuses each curl & line & flourish
where feeling is an act of defiance
who tries to read these traces of gestures
retraces the route of the writer’s hand
this body that responds to another’s