cold
running branches feeding down. Itâs startling.
But sense is startling, too. See how those boots
flip skyward? Tongues lapping up dew on his
mâché dandelions. This is Stevieâs dream
miniacreage on the familyâs old spread.
Heâs all spread out; heâs humming when he makes
a working thingâhe wonât let you inside.
âSo,â he says. Today heâs stacked two propane
tanks and ovensâtwo-burnersâunder a
red maple, and when you open a door
thereâs mismatched silver and hatchets and things
heâs made to eat and art with. Studio
as wherever-youâre-itching-at-the-time:
boards with big nails banged in and from the nails
hang gourds, baby-sized cups speckled yellow
(is that old egg?), a hundred kinds of who
knows what, the center being where you are
and are not. âI stay dry,â he says. âNo bugs.â
Says, âWhy do walls want windows?â Heâs put glass
around his trees instead, head-high, to look
at trees from outside out. One chair, sleeping bag
âwhat he keeps inside the wild corn binâ
plus a getaway, by which he means a tunnel.
âOh oh,â he says, âthey coming.â He can worm
his way all the way to the apple trees,
he trenched it out last fall, and lights the route
with flashlights and tinfoil clipped to clothesline.
Thatâs a trip. And thatâs a curvy planter full
of nursery nipples and hand-dipped Ken dolls.
If you want to see an art made wholly
in an outside mind, come see Stevieâs crib.
Thatâs his ten-foot pink polyvinyl penis
teeter-totter beside the birdcage
for potatoes. âTake a ride,â he says. All eyesâ.
from The Southern Review
RICK BAROT
Child Holding Potato
When my sister got her diagnosis,
I bought an airplane ticket
but to another city, where I stared
at paintings that seemed victorious
in their relation to time:
the beech from two hundred years ago,
its trunk a palette of mud
and gilt; the man with olive-black
gloves, the sky behind him
a glacier of blue light. In their calm
landscapes, the saints. Still dripping
the gardenâs dew, the bouquets.
Holding the rough gold orb
of a potato, the Child cradled
by the glowing Madonna. Then,
the paintings I looked at the longest:
the bowls of plums and peaches,
the lemons, the pomegranates
like red earths. In my mouth,
the raw starch. In my mouth, the dirt.
from Memorious
REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS
At the End of Life, a Secret
Everything measured. A man twists
a tuft of your hair out for no reason
other than you are naked before him
and he is bored. Moments ago he was
weighing your gallbladder, and then
he was staring at the empty space where
your lungs were. Even dead, we still say
you are an organ donor, as if something
other than taxes outlasts death. Your feet
are regular feet. Two of them,
and there is no mark to suggest you were
an expert mathematician, that you were
the first runner-up in debate championships,
1956, Tapioca, Illinois. From the time your body
was carted before him, to the time your
dead body is being sent to the coffin,
every pound is accounted for, except 22 grams.
The man is a praying man & has figured
what it means. He says this is the soul, finally,
after the breath has gone. The soul: less than
4,000 dollarsâ worth of crackâ22 gramsâ
all that moves you through this world.
from New England Review
FRANK BIDART
Of His Bones Are Coral Made
He still trolled books, films, gossip, his own
past, searching not just for
ideas that dissect the mountain that
in his early old age he is almost convinced
cannot be dissected:
he searched for stories:
stories the pattern of whose
knot dimly traces the pattern of his own:
what is intolerable in
the world, which is to say
intolerable in himself, ingested, digested:
the stories that
haunt each of us, for each of us
rip open the mountain.
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the