We were getting along even better than average, actually. I suspected I might be a better person for a while.
Chipmunk on the path almost as fast as I can see it. Underneath the crisping reddish edges—all the fear in the world but I didn’t say it like that.
If Kairos has an arc, it’s toward her will to act, to feel something other than the guilt and pressure Hans exerts, to question his version of events, to regard his violent control not as inevitable but as a force she can resist.
Falling out of love, with an object as much as with a person, is a rupture between the past and present selves.
I’m at the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles with a friend waiting on a green card. He’s just moved to Ohio. Same as me.
Everyone keeps telling me
my mother looked so pretty
in her casket. They try to assure me
the mortician did a good job.
My mother looked better
alive.
The dead lover is the eternal muse, his voice revoked by death, his consent unattainable.
After the line “but when you talk about destruction,” he could not decide whether he wanted to sing
“don’t you know that you can count me out,”
or
“don’t you know that you can count me in.”
In forlorn diners and working-class bars lay the solution to a mystery hiding in plain sight. If one could only drill down into the center of the country’s psyche, one might reason a way back from the brink.
Both the impotence of art and the complicity of the world in the face of atrocity have demonstrated that armed, decolonial struggle never lost its urgency or necessity, despite what the triumphalists of the “end of history” would have hoped.
Surface Studies is about reading and writing, not encyclopedic knowledge, cultural context or the history of literature, awards, sales, or markets.
Watch Your Language shadows So to Speak, offering what the poems can’t—not explanations of the origins of lyric impulse, but a recreation of the process involved in coaxing it.