Issue 111

So you would rather be sleepy tomorrow, / says husband. Do not believe / it works that way

Smoothed for gripping is not for resisting what would / you resist: wood of which you are made you must be / inside of:

Duplex isn’t a disenchanted world, where saints have been replaced by stonemasons. It’s not even a world where belief in the soul has been replaced by the fact of robots. It’s a hinged world, a duplex world, where the human and the cosmic, the soul and the stars, stand side by side.

It’s taken me / almost a decade to admit it: I miss. I’ve missed / feeding all my thoughts through that revolving blade / so thin it could only be felt.

Let me be clear: I desire you / as a body desires a body. As a fern / / bends toward the window, night & day.

I set you children a lesson, Mary says. Our unknown is I am.

In ballet class they were always chiding us to not allow the difficulty of the act to be expressed in the hands… We girls were being taught the art of concealing art, ars est celare artem, the method wherein obfuscation becomes a weft to gird the warp of technique.

I mourn again my wrong belief / that evil can ignite the arrival of good

When it comes to commemoration, / the great advantage of sculpture/ is how it tends to outlast / not only what happened / but everything surrounding it, / suggesting a context / is that which rots away.