Pluralite des Mondes

Isn't the moon warm enough for you? Aren't there enough words flowing in your veins to keep you going? If you like a poet's work, please support them if you can by buying their books.

[missedstations]

"Envoi" - Aaron Fagan

One must savor An inability To put certain Appetites into Words—my Shadow comes To look for me But not for long. Ignore the case Of paradise: A beast hiding In a cave Still feels The sunless rain.

[missedstations]

"Landscape with footprints in ash" - Selma Asotić

You must leave for the story to begin is what fairytales taught me. I left. My ghosts now trail behind and weep. I try to comfort them. At night I place a bowl of milk on the terrace. I promise a trip to the sea. They disappear. When I'm alone in the room all catastrophes are easily traceable. I bury my mind. Useless mill churning voices, plastic straws, bills, hands demanding to give and give and give. My own hands I fling down the river. At the estuary they remember everything. In my head is a circle farm. If I die, this very moment, no one will finish what I set out to say. What will you do then, my misery? Already August. In heat, things expand. So do minutes. Fire swallows trees, entire forests. At some point, there won't be anything left to burn. Fire has no future. What a relief for the fire.

[missedstations]

"Dreaming of Li Po" - Cedar Sigo

II This cloud of souls has wandered all over the sky, gone to the corner store and may never come back I have dreamed of your face for three nights and each time it rises, it redefines itself You warn of general dangers and rise quickly to leave iced over fears, born of an iron ship torn in half and the silhouette in aggregate placed in a tiny doorway, his expression a touch bewildered The city is run by enterprising zombies and occasional artists I choose to sit in the center of an empty white room as a half dead flower The net of dream and interdependence gets torn throughout the night —haphazard curses begin to fly (one thousand years of infamy) What good is all of this when I am left for dead and looking on?

[missedstations]

"Forever Plastics" - Ronald Carson

(Inventory, 1950–present)

We were the dream of convenience, the permanent press.  We were the yogurt cup you spooned empty at dawn,  the blister-pack popped for a single white pill,  the slick, sterile innards of the IV that saved you.

We were the unbreakable toy in the 1962 sandbox,  the fleece that wicked your first marathon sweat,  the photo-bright banner that welcomed you home from a war  you only understood through our lens.

We are the hangover of that dream.  We are the lint in your deepest lung pocket,  the bright shard in the albatross’s gullet,  the glint in your daughter’s first meconium.

We are the polymer of your placenta’s print,  the slow, milky bead in your grandfather’s cataract lens  through which he sees a world softening at the edges.

We do not arrive as invasion.  We are issued at conception,  like a social-security number,  like a name you cannot change.

We perform the trophic math:  krill eats colorful flake,  salmon eats krill,  you eat salmon,  we pay compound dividends in your marrow fat.

Our half-life is a new form of forever.  Every birthday candle is a small, bright flare  against the petrochemical balance sheet  you carry inside your own body.

We are the derivative that never degrades,  the toxic asset sliced thinner than sunlight,  securitized and repackaged  until the valuation is your own vasculature.

Your 1950-cutoff is a fairy tale.  We were waiting in the womb’s warm lobby to disprove.

We are the call coming from inside the house.

We are the house.

We are the mortar in its very cells,  the silent, synthetic hinge  on which your own heart swings.

We are the heirloom you did not ask for,  the inheritance that cannot be refused,  the future fossil of your present,  already here.

[missedstations]

"Spectral Prophecies" - Lara Atallah

Speckled omens leave their fingerprints on their ghostly faces. The fleeting patter of rain slicks the asphalt beneath them. This is how history gets rewritten: in the gaps between their bodies, against the backdrop of early spring. Somewhere in the long middle of the end. He, in military attire, an oak tree with galaxies smeared inside him. She, a forest in a barren world. By now, I know how this story goes. The war will architect their undoing, decades and petty arguments stacked up against a god of futile things. Illness will harvest their lifespans. He will gasp for eight years, bargaining with fate. Her heart will break again and again until it gives out. Between them, a daughter. One day, a mother whose face will mark mine. In that moment, flanked by her parents, she stands infinite as the trees behind her. Hair draping shoulders. Body barely pubescent. Hand over heart. You can tell she still believes the world loves her. Head tilted upwards, she dreams herself in-flight, hedging her bets on the vastness of a borderless sky.

[missedstations]

"Algo in the genocide" - Omar Sakr

Okay I won’t use the word Jewish And I won’t use the word Zionist And I won’t use the word genocide And I won’t use the word apartheid And I won’t use the word settler And I won’t use the word colony And I won’t use the word killed And I won’t use the word watermelon And I won’t use the word Palestine And I won’t use the word resistance And I won’t use the word law And I won’t use the word moral And I won’t use the word men And I won’t use the word God And I won’t use the word river And I won’t use the word sea And I won’t use the word free And I won’t use the word children For the young of ____ are always ____ What are we left with at the end? A murdered dictionary and field After silent field of unmarked graves."

[missedstations]

"High Jump as Divination" - Gustav Parker Hibbett

The second-last step is the most important. There are said to be those who can tell if someone’s gonna clear their jump just by watching the way their body dips, how much upward force they generate, the angle of their planted knee. It’s crucial, make or break: how you get down governs how you fly; you either leave with wings or you stay human, decided in the moment just before the moment. You take videos of yourself, cut them off before the jump, then scramble them so you can’t remember which result each run-up led to. Watch your yellow jumping shoes hit the mark again and again, until you blur into a queue of selves in uniform. A tense flutter of shoelaces. Halo of dust dislodged, like a moonwalker. Learn to read this language like a kind of augur. You’ll either make it or you won’t.

[missedstations]

[A long time ago] - Tao Yuanming

A long time ago I went on a journey, Right to the corner Of the Eastern Ocean. The road there Was long and winding, And stormy waves Barred my path. What made me Go this way? Hunger drove me Into the World. I tried hard To fill my belly: And even a little Seemed a lot. But this was clearly A bad bargain, So I went home And lived in idleness.

translated from the Chinese by Arthur Waley

[missedstations]

"Fidelity" - William Ward Butler

Grocery store carnations arranged on a kitchen table— call things what they are—they’re dead,

the flowers, the water only delays their dying. Online, a biology forum debates what constitutes death:

Tissue dies, someone writes, and everyone agrees though not on a definition. Theory of mind,

theories of everything—I trained to be an English teacher for years before I suffered under a principal

who warned me:  pronouns are heavy here, and I agreed, though we meant different things, he was telling me

to avoid teaching a part of speech. My friend had a hysterectomy before the state could take away

his right to do it; more friends married last year for the same reason, rings bought with a promise

to upgrade them in the future. I like mimicry in nature, eyespots on a moth, though I recognize

that change is one response to brutality— like Judith slaying Holofernes, her sword passing cleanly through

the despot’s neck; when the people of her besieged city saw his severed head, they must have applauded,

they must have felt such unrepentant joy.

[missedstations]

"Mise en Abîme" - Rhoni Blankenhorn

Every time I pick up a glass, I am afraid because addiction runs in my family, because I could not save dad from it, and because while I am as stubborn as a fat, little dog, I worry that one day I'll slip into a shape I can't shake off. My relationship to reality is already fraught. The hours I give to volcano podcasts and vampire T.V. shows prove that I am susceptible to disconnection. I've inherited other things: dad's glossy hair, his rash-prone skin, his nasal cavity's dramatic reaction to cats. I remember lying side by side on his bed, the dark blue and cream floral comforter that felt cold to the touch. He was teaching me how to meditate, or more precisely, how to build a place in my mind I could retreat to. "Imagine a pond," he said, "smooth the ripples out," and he counted until I slowed my breath, my heartbeat. "This is how you can pretend to be dead," he said, "if you ever need to."

[missedstations]

"Danish Mayfly Named Insect of the Year" - Ron Koertge

Unfortunately, the mayfly lives a mere twenty-four hours so doesn't get to enjoy the award for very long. A representative mayfly isn't flown to Oslo to attend a lavish ceremony and give a short speech thanking parents and colleagues who believed in him during the four-to-six hours of a difficult adolescence. A mayfly's love life consists of one liaison above a pond. So no time to meet someone else with a cuter thorax. No time for treachery and lies, no time for sleepless nights or passionate reunions in the rain. They are born, they mate, lay eggs, die by the thousands. Every spring fragile bodies are swept off of windshields as commuters wonder how much longer they can make this drive day after day, month after month, year after year.

[missedstations]

[Each morning before dawn,] - Gary Young

Each morning before dawn, a woodpecker and a scold of jays fight over the feeder, screaming and screeching like demons. Over the course of the day, other birds call out: the spotted towhee, the robin and finch, and the siskin with its pitiful, one-note squeal. At dusk, the mourning dove’s breathy melody echoes through the canyon. It’s enough to break your heart, this tune I can imagine being played on a flute carved from bone.

[missedstations]

"A Brief History of Arrhythmia" - Rachel Mallalieu

First of all, we’ve been using the wrong word all these years. It means without rhythm. The only arrhythmia is asystole, I tell my students. That’s the flat line accompanied by the clang of alarms in all the television dramas. There’s not much you can do about it; the patient is dead and usually stays dead. The correct word to describe all the ways a heart can dance and die is dysrhythmia, which means a disordered rhythm. There’s the soldiered march of ventricular tachycardia or the pirouette twirl of Torsades. Ventricular fibrillation simply quivers on the monitor. When these rhythms occur, the patient is pulseless and sometimes you give magnesium, usually shock, and always pump their chest to the beat of whatever song lives in your head. Once I was speaking with a man who stopped in the middle of a word, and I watched the rhythm on the monitor change. When I didn’t feel a pulse, I started CPR, and then we placed the paddles on his chest and shouted, Clear, just like in the movies. And it worked. He opened his eyes and looked at me and said, I don’t feel good. And I said, It’s ok, I’m going to get you better and smoothed the hair from his forehead, but then the alarms blared and the V tach returned, and we did it all over again—the drugs and compressions and shocks, and his eyes opened one more time and he mouthed, I’m scared around the tube I’d placed in his throat, and I said, I’m here with you. But that was the last time he said anything. We didn’t stop for thirty minutes or more. He’d waved to his family when the medics loaded him into the ambulance with just a little chest pain, so they were shocked when I entered the small consult room to tell them he had died. His teenage son collapsed and landed on his knees and punched the ground and said, But we were fighting, and I think the last thing I said was I hate you. All I’m trying to say is that it’s really important to use the right words.

[missedstations]

"Spirits" - Anders Carlson-Wee

We’d lift gin from your mother’s cabinet and walk the hallways of Robert Asp Middle taking swigs in plain sight from a 20 oz Pepsi Clear, your gap tooth flashing at teachers we passed, your hands forgetting to pass the bottle, screwing and unscrewing the cap. After that I moved. We lost track. The news was six months old by the time I heard. When they don’t say what happened you know what happened. We used to catch rides from highschoolers out to the Red to jump the bridge. Water thick with clay. Red with clay. We kept close watch for underwater logs. Smoked Menthols. A 40-foot drop into swirls of currents. One time you stayed under and kicked downstream to trick me. Nervous, I stared at the surface for signs. No signs. I stumbled down the bank to dive in. The moment you were certain you had me the valley cracked with your laughter.

[missedstations]

"Bounded Regret Algorithim" - Zoë Hitzig

Mine is a life dedicated to the calculation of loss. I know with certainty almost nothing. Yet here I am executing legions of decisions each moment. I aim to organize my ledgers like a skull. A place I imagine to be full. Of spreadsheets that seizure like cities. Undefined functions that compile just fine. Explore, record, explore, record, explore, record. Eventually I learn to limit the loss. I come to know where I should not go: The fire escape, zip codes with low property taxes, some drugs, some jobs. Then the threshold beyond which I'm just an airplane. Occasionally I fly new routes but never load more than a few hundred passengers. Nor advance into the sequence of sky that vibrates behind the sky I have seen. Never the pilot undressing in a suburb when the flight is over. Pressing an unclosed hand against a cold bedroom window.

[missedstations]

"Landscape with the Night" - Aiden Heung

I was left behind, a bent nail rusting in the gutter. All the important people

had driven away in their expensive cars. It was easier not to chase the next—

the next bus, the next village, the next self to lose in the shimmer of another promise.

My hands held what I owned: a sales kit of well-treated bricks; its black leather

bit into my palm. In my palm sweat hungered for more sweat. 2022, East China,

I was young, I had a body to trade. I had on a suit bigger than myself.

Gray-haired workers sat at the curbs, smoked, shoes glued

to the bitumen road, their eyes like fingers thumbing my face. They didn’t know I wore

their skin. In the air the rotten scent of a long summer. I could feel

the dandruff in my hair. Evening began to tease me with the weight of a pillow.

No motels in sight. I stood at a streetlamp, waited for its russet glow to wash over me.

The factory, a throne against the encroaching dark. I offered all I had—

The light came on. I reached out my hand, wet and callused. A statue, throat full of ash.

[missedstations]

"American Sonnet w/ A God Complex" - Donte Collins

You’re doing it again—debating the use of beauty. I’m sorry, really. I haven’t been to a party in over a year and I keep needing to ask everyone if they’ve bought a gun too. So I feel most American when I’m masturbating. Or maybe when the DoorDash driver leaves my food in the lobby. Or when my boyfriend begs to be degraded. It’s all the same, really: Fetch. Now he’s guiding my hands to his throat. I kiss every inch of him until he cries then slap him. It’s okay, I whisper. Let it out, I dig. I enter him in increments, as rain would stitch starlight into marsh. You’re doing it again—confessing everything but the point. Who knows, I’ve only been alive once and so far l’d rather God’s austere silence. What’s love got to do w/ it? What’s love but a second-hand smoke? I’d go ghost too if my poems kept begging for a mercy they were born to invent. What earth-awful static. Yeah, I’d build a gate w/ the leftover bones. Use me Daddy, our lonely music. Yeah yeah I’d paint it pearl too.