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PLAGUED BY PINK MOON

Kushal Poddar

I stoop to see the lone mushroom exploding near the feet of a tree, and above the perigee reminds me of the invisible prawler; some subsist to prey upon some latent for being hunted. Down, down spins the leaves. No one crowds the park. No one walks these streets. No one whispers, "Hey, cover your inside. The night shall burst out ere long." No one saunters back to no one's house as if this role has been crafted for me, us, as if those nothings we avail for dinnertime chitchat fulfils the potential of mankind. "Lovely mushroom." No one says. "See, pink moon." The other answers. The shadows become I and you for one moment and eternity.

PALINDROME IX

Michael Begnal

Easily identified as a torture truck, aluminum sides, paneling in which framed small squares of pink skin, soft and warm and crushed in the next lane, and driving the cab: someone who should consider suicide

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six-eyed somnambulist gone, intervention came in the neck, line, shaft in, swarmed in, scorched off pink skin sandwiched, farmed, small squares aluminum, shades pummeling as a door, tar-dark as a lie, a tender foot

THINGS I THINK YOU SAID

Mileva Anastasiadou

I won’t wake up unless I need to, you say, I won’t sleep, nor dream, nor work, nor eat unless I need to.

I’m limitless now. No time, no boundaries, no forces imposed. So I remain still.

Wealth is theft, you yell, when people die due to lack of food, or resources.

Wealth is theft, you yell, when people can’t breathe, or breathe bubbles of plague, and then they die.

Things I think you said, buzz in my ear, haunt me, as if you were a ghost, as if I only dreamt of you, the voice in my head, that once was loud.

Wealth is murder, you whisper. The first sign of the pandemic, immunity to irony, thanking the rich for donations, which mean little to them, while the rich ask for donations, while the rich steal our symbols, and pretend to work hard, and isolate in beautiful homes, pointing their fingers to those, who don’t have a home, who don’t have food, who can’t afford safety, for animals will ignore the danger, animals will seek food, but this is all normal to your eyes, for we’re all animals, seeking safety, only some pretend to be wiser, stronger, better fit to survive.

And I wish I had invented those words. I wish they were mine. But those words belong to you, even if you never spoke them.

It’s ok to regress, you say. It’s ok to stay still. Pretend that life goes on as usual, then fall apart, like nothing matters. Then start again, as hope infiltrates your lungs, hope stronger than any virus.

One pandemic after another, one disaster over another, your voice disappears, irony vanishes. And I carry the old world inside, like treasure, like a part of me that hurts, like phantom pain. Rhinoceros turning to dust, one after another.

Who owns those words if you spoke them in my dream?

Comments Serving as Introduction to upfromsumdirt’s Deifying a Total Darkness

As delivered on March 1st 2020 on the occasion of the release of the full-length poetry collection from Harry Tankoos Books. Zinc Bar, NYC.

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I first connected with the man born Ron Davis on, of all hellscapes to meet someone, the internet. He commented on a Tumblr post of mine, which is something no one had ever done before. I immediately researched who he was—this poet-person behind the mask of a spaceless, lowercased, string of words: upfromsumdirt. I was immediately smitten by the work—and that’s smitten in both senses: a strong attraction and struck with a firm blow. I knew within an hour I wanted to publish his work.

Since that moment, I’ve experienced a ceaseless string of skull-thuds in the form of upfromsumdirt’s poetry. Which is why I’m so honored and pleased to be presenting him here, to mark the occasion of these works finding some jerry-rigged containment in the form of this beautifully constructed full-length collection.

Deifying a Total Darkness represents what’s most rewarding, in my opinion, of brother dirt’s work. Ron has a certain irreverence (he recently referred to it as “avoiding any contrived sense of professionalism”) toward the body of work he’s been cultivating down in Kentucky. It’s as though he had zero expectations that this work would reach, zombie-like, from the patted earth and muddy sludge across the screens of laptops and smartphones.

There’s play to his Afro-pessimism and an organic base to his futurism, and so “the space suit explodes petals” and “the astronaut [is] a houseplant.” His Afro-futurism is like Rammellzee’s: forward-seeking while wildstyling with junkart mixed media costumes constructed of this world’s trash culture. This is all to say he presents to us the detritus of this failed intercontinental project called capital.

Much like his award-winning visual art—these poetic lines cobble together sources like a compost pile of the humbler gods. In his own words, they are “blackly chaotic.”

He reads with a deliberate disaffection—he refuses to stand in front of crowds and showtime and inflect with theatrics. He prefers to lull you into a false sense of security as the words themselves gnaw through your skin like spirited germs.

He never seems far from the medical condition known as witzelsucht—a pathology, or curse, or gift (I would argue) of a human being who can’t stop making puns. And so we get these gems dropped on us routinely: in one such example, “[he’s] got what you creed.” Meanwhile, “Shakespeare sits up in his grave [to utter] ‘all lines matter’” / he reinvents Rakim: “syncin’ up our master plans ain’t nothin’ but syntax inside our hands.” / “swing low Sweet Harriet” / “the Wolof in sheep’s clothing.” His allusiveness and punning are relentless, boundless.

I also admire his anti-institutionalization of poetry positioning. Of AWP, he asks, “how many poets does it take to ekphrasis a lightbulb?” I admire his kaleidoscopic vision of Black Art—he’s Ishmael Reed’s unruly and disobedient son, making the father proud. He’s got no regard for polish or sheen—in fact, he says “‘shoo, polish!’ / is the black poet’s eternal stanza.” He’s daring and crude enough to mix high and low registers to make his noise, which is at times a clattery cacophony and at other times a Lexington lullaby.

His activism shines in poems like “Photographer Catches the Exact Moment A Volcano Erupts,” which appraises the Baltimore uprising of 2015. He conceives the deep potholes and craggy hunks of loosened asphalt that comprised the streets, the pathway, the so-called “rough ride” Freddie Gray was subjected to as a matter of geology—that’s to say a scientific inevitability. A volcanic eruption that was destined to occur because we still live on the fissures even though we like to forget we do.

The seriousness is always undergirded by dark humor, though, as he writes: “i’m anti- / fascist and it keeps raining ketchup / no wonder we’re american.”

These reasons, all of them, are why I’m so pleased to be a friend, collaborator, and fan of Ron’s. And now we all get to hear it in-person: upfromsumdirt.