Burning fuel but not to leave,
boys circled town, came back
to the station where they began.

Gas exhaust drifted like spirits
above asphalt, dissolving in the night.

Girls stayed in the lot,
waiting for men old enough
to buy liquor, their names
claiming the land-
long after other names lay
buried in the ground.

They kept to the faces,
legs folded on hoods,
lip gloss catching the station lights,
bracelets chiming, hair flips rehearsed,
laughing at trucks circling back.
They wanted to be chosen, and I tried
to want that too- tried to be a girl among girls,
waiting for the moment some hand
would tug me out of the circle.

But my eyes kept straying-
across the street,
to the rise that was not just dirt
but a chest under earth,
ribs shifting,
a hum curling into my throat.
Something skeletal in its patience,
as if Baykok himself
were sharpening arrows in the dark,
waiting for breath to break.
Built long before us by Ojibwe,
still honored as sacred ground.

The others smoked, struck sparks,
sequins spilling from careless wrists,
never thinking how easily flame
might travel down, through us,
into what we couldn’t see.
I could hear bones shifting,
a buried drumbeat, the land’s own warning.

Every glance of the mound
pulled me back into silence.
It told me what the others
didn’t want to know-
that all this circling, waiting,
was only the lid of a grave.

1
Who will honor the city without a name
If so many are dead and others pan gold
Or sell arms in faraway countries?


What shepherd's horn swathed in the bark of birch
Will sound in the Ponary Hills the memory of the absent—
Vagabonds, Pathfinders, brethren of a dissolved lodge?


This spring, in a desert, beyond a campsite flagpole,
—In silence that stretched to the solid rock of yellow and red mountains—
I heard in a gray bush the buzzing of wild bees.


The current carried an echo and the timber of rafts.
A man in a visored cap and a woman in a kerchief
Pushed hard with their four hands at a heavy steering oar.


In the library, below a tower painted with the signs of the zodiac,
Kontrym would take a whiff from his snuffbox and smile
For despite Metternich all was not yet lost.


And on crooked lanes down the middle of a sandy highway
Jewish carts went their way while a black grouse hooted
Standing on a cuirassier's helmet, a relict of La Grande Armée.


2
In Death Valley I thought about styles of hairdo,
About a hand that shifted spotlights at the Student's Ball
In the city from which no voice could reach me.
Minerals did not sound the last trumpet.
There was only the rustle of a loosened grain of lava.


In Death Valley salt gleams from a dried-up lake bed.
Defend, defend yourself, says the tick-tock of the blood.
From the futility of solid rock, no wisdom.


In Death Valley no hawk or eagle against the sky.
The prediction of a Gypsy woman has come true.
In a lane under an arcade, then, I was reading a poem
Of someone who had lived next door, entitled 'An Hour of Thought.'


I looked long at the rearview mirror: there, the one man
Within three miles, an Indian, was walking a bicycle uphill.


3
With flutes, with torches
And a drum, boom, boom,
Look, the one who died in Istanbul, there, in the first row.
He walks arm in arm with his young lady,
And over them swallows fly.


They carry oars or staffs garlanded with leaves
And bunches of flowers from the shores of the Green Lakes,
As they came closer and closer, down Castle Street.
And then suddenly nothing, only a white puff of cloud
Over the Humanities Student Club,
Division of Creative Writing.


4
Books, we have written a whole library of them.
Lands, we have visited a great many of them.
Battles, we have lost a number of them.
Till we are no more, we and our Maryla.


5
Understanding and pity,
We value them highly.
What else?


Beauty and kisses,
Fame and its prizes,
Who cares?


Doctors and lawyers,
Well-turned-out majors,
Six feet of earth.


Rings, furs, and lashes,
Glances at Masses,
Rest in peace.


Sweet twin *******, good night.
Sleep through to the light,
Without spiders.


6
The sun goes down above the Zealous Lithuanian Lodge
And kindles fire on landscapes 'made from nature':
The Wilia winding among pines; black honey of the Żejmiana;
The Mereczanka washes berries near the Żegaryno village.
The valets had already brought in Theban candelabra
And pulled curtains, one after the other, slowly,
While, thinking I entered first, taking off my gloves,
I saw that all the eyes were fixed on me.


7
When I got rid of grieving
And the glory I was seeking,
Which I had no business doing,


I was carried by dragons
Over countries, bays, and mountains,
By fate, or by what happens.


Oh yes, I wanted to be me.
I toasted mirrors weepily
And learned my own stupidity.


From nails, mucous membrane,
Lungs, liver, bowels, and spleen
Whose house is made? Mine.


So what else is new?
I am not my own friend.
Time cuts me in two.


Monuments covered with snow,
Accept my gift. I wandered;
And where, I don't know.


8
Absent, burning, acrid, salty, sharp.
Thus the feast of Insubstantiality.
Under a gathering of clouds anywhere.
In a bay, on a plateau, in a dry arroyo.
No density. No harness of stone.
Even the Summa thins into straw and smoke.
And the angelic choirs fly over in a pomegranate seed
Sounding every few instants, not for us, their trumpets.


9
Light, universal, and yet it keeps changing.
For I love the light too, perhaps the light only.
Yet what is too dazzling and too high is not for me.
So when the clouds turn rosy, I think of light that is level
In the lands of birch and pine coated with crispy lichen,
Late in autumn, under the hoarfrost when the last milk caps
Rot under the firs and the hounds' barking echoes,
And jackdaws wheel over the tower of a Basilian church.


10
Unexpressed, untold.
But how?
The shortness of life,
the years quicker and quicker,
not remembering whether it happened in this or that autumn.
Retinues of homespun velveteen skirts,
giggles above a railing, pigtails askew,
sittings on chamberpots upstairs
when the sledge jingles under the columns of the porch
just before the moustachioed ones in wolf fur enter.
Female humanity,
children's snots, legs spread apart,
snarled hair, the milk boiling over,
stench, **** frozen into clods.
And those centuries,
conceiving in the herring smell of the middle of the night
instead of playing something like a game of chess
or dancing an intellectual ballet.
And palisades,
and pregnant sheep,
and pigs, fast eaters and poor eaters,
and cows cured by incantations.


11
Not the Last Judgment, just a kermess by a river.
Small whistles, clay chickens, candied hearts.
So we trudged through the slush of melting snow
To buy bagels from the district of Smorgonie.


A fortune-teller hawking: 'Your destiny, your planets.'
And a toy devil bobbing in a tube of crimson brine.
Another, a rubber one, expired in the air squeaking,
By the stand where you bought stories of King Otto and Melusine.


12
Why should that city, defenseless and pure as the wedding necklace of
a forgotten tribe, keep offering itself to me?
Like blue and red-brown seeds beaded in Tuzigoot in the copper desert
seven centuries ago.


Where ocher rubbed into stone still waits for the brow and cheekbone
it would adorn, though for all that time there has been no one.


What evil in me, what pity has made me deserve this offering?


It stands before me, ready, not even the smoke from one chimney is
lacking, not one echo, when I step across the rivers that separate us.


Perhaps Anna and Dora Drużyno have called to me, three hundred miles
inside Arizona, because except fo me no one else knows that they ever
lived.


They trot before me on Embankment Street, two hently born parakeets
from Samogitia, and at night they unravel their spinster tresses of gray
hair.


Here there is no earlier and no later; the seasons of the year and of the
day are simultaneous.


At dawn ****-wagons leave town in long rows and municipal employees
at the gate collect the turnpike toll in leather bags.


Rattling their wheels, 'Courier' and 'Speedy' move against the current
to Werki, and an oarsman shot down over England skiffs past, spread-
eagled by his oars.


At St. Peter and Paul's the angels lower their thick eyelids in a smile
over a nun who has indecent thoughts.


Bearded, in a wig, Mrs. Sora Klok sits at the ocunter, instructing her
twelve shopgirls.


And all of German Street tosses into the air unfurled bolts of fabric,
preparing itself for death and the conquest of Jerusalem.


Black and princely, an underground river knocks at cellars of the
cathedral under the tomb of St. Casimir the Young and under the
half-charred oak logs in the hearth.


Carrying her servant's-basket on her shoulder, Barbara, dressed in
mourning, returns from the Lithuanian Mass at St. Nicholas to the
Romers' house in Bakszta Street.


How it glitters! the snow on Three Crosses Hill and Bekiesz Hill, not
to be melted by the breath of these brief lives.


And what do I know now, when I turn into Arsenal Street and open
my eyes once more on a useless end of the world?


I was running, as the silks rustled, through room after room without
stopping, for I believed in the existence of a last door.


But the shape of lips and an apple and a flower pinned to a dress were
all that one was permitted to know and take away.


The Earth, neither compassionate nor evil, neither beautiful nor atro-
cious, persisted, innocent, open to pain and desire.


And the gift was useless, if, later on, in the flarings of distant nights,
there was not less bitterness but more.


If I cannot so exhaust my life and their life that the bygone crying is
transformed, at last, into harmony.


Like a Noble Jan Dęboróg in the Straszun's secondhand-book shop, I am
put to rest forever between tow familiar names.


The castle tower above the leafy tumulus grows small and there is still
a hardly audible—is it Mozart's Requiem?—music.


In the immobile light I move my lips and perhaps I am even glad not
to find the desired word.

I remember a story, it starts at fourteen.
I had a crooked back and low self esteem.
I was afraid I was gonna end up in a ditch somewhere.

I had to devise myself a plan
of which direction to go if **** hit the fan
and I knew my mother wanted a prodigy child

So I figured I could sing or get really smart,
but my voice would crack and my mind was dark,
so I decided, in this crazy world,
that I could rob graves.

So I left home when I was sixteen
my boredom peaked and my senses keened
I grew with a morbid fascination with the dead

It started out
me figuring that
they wouldn’t miss their dimes, their shoes or their hats
I tramped on the dusty trail with an evil eye

As I ended up along the borderline
I met another young man who had gone insane.
He just got back from the war.
Like he said: “I’ve seen some things.”

So we rode together for quite a while
in the dust on the trail for a thousand miles
until one night, we came upon an unmarked grave.

My partner fumbled around in his pockets
evading worms and maggots from his sockets.
He turned around and looked at me with his crazy smile

It turned out what he found was a letter
and with this smile he said: “The dead have it better.”
So i reached out to grab it while the stench arose.

He handed it to me and on front and back
I read about this lonely, old, sad sack
who, being sick of life, ended up hanging himself.

This really put things into perspective for me
for the attention me and my partner was giving, you see,
was often more than these people received in life.

But one windy day the law caught on our path
and with a holstered gun me and my partner had
we stopped by a local tavern to wet our throats.

The law had converged in the front door
my partner flinched before I could do more.
And before I knew it he had bolted down for the gun.

Before I could say another word
he dropped to the floor and his fingers curled.
He rattled and faded away while I was restrained.

As I was lying on my stomach on the ground
I looked over and I heard a sound
It was my partner whispering his final words.

“The dead have it better.”

He suddenly felt a sadness that only a letter might lighten. Thoughts of her he carried variously in and from the spaces and places this hot day had taken him. The morning had been warmer than in previous days, and even at 6.0am there was a heaviness present carrying a threat of thunder and rain.

He knew she was not at her best in the leaden heat of this hemisphere, whilst enjoying the dry, brittle heat of Africa and beyond. He remembered a hot train journey and a busy day moving boxes into a studio space. They were fond memories because in such heat she took on a delicacy about her. He would perceive her features and movement to be finely drawn, and that perception revealed her profound beauty. Such recollections were foundations in his love for her.

Today he had decided to avoid that daily confrontation with the project that lay invisibly on his desk, locked up in his computer, though unsorted sheets of graph paper, populated with planning, were evident on his drawing board. This project was a ‘book’ of studies for an ensemble in Chicago whose performances were marked by such energy and virtuosity; the music was growing steadily, but he felt suspicious that it had been contrived. He hoped his precise positioning of pitch and rhythm would have brought forth a surface colouring and texture. It had not. He would often imagine symbols and words he could not yet define lying on a transparent sheet over the rather bland matter-of-fact notation of his scores. He had known only occasional moments of such graphic invention, and when they appear ‘right’, they enlivened and enhanced his work.

He had put aside today as a listening day, an opportunity to listen carefully to a group of new compositions presented in a series of broadcast concerts and available to re-audition over the Internet. Didn’t Van Gogh write to his brother about the need to rest during a period of intense creativity and spend a day copying another’s work? This was an equivalent to his ‘active listening’, listening with a pencil and paper, taking a shorthand of the music’s action and journey.

The first piece on his listening list was a four-minute composition for chorus and orchestra. He had been intrigued that the composer had set words by Richard Jeffries, a 19C author who had written children’s adventures about a parochial natural world and had become admired by today’s new nature writers. It was said Jeffries had instigated Henry Williamson’s closely observed prose. He had set about finding the words – hardly discernable in the rich sonic accumulation of voices and instruments in the broadcast performance. Eventually, thanks to a brief comment by the composer in his introduction and a line that leapt with clarity from the music (the butterfly floats in the light-laden air), found a passage in a book called A Study of My Heart.

Recognising my own inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, I cannot understand time. It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life. Here this moment, by this tumulus, on earth, now; I exist in it. The years, the centuries, the cycles are absolutely nothing; it is only a moment since this tumulus was raised; in a thousand years it will still be only a moment. To the soul there is no past and no future; all is and will be ever, in now. For artificial purposes time is mutually agreed on, but is really no such thing. The shadow goes on upon the dial, the index moves round upon the clock, and what is the difference? None whatever. If the clock had never been set going, what would have been the difference? There may be time for the clock, the clock may make time for itself; there is none for me. . . . There is no separation-no past; eternity, the Now, is continuous. When all the stars have revolved they only produce Now again. The continuity of Now is for ever. So that it appears to me purely natural, and not super natural, that the soul whose temporary frame was interred in this mound should be existing as I sit on the sward. How infinitely deeper is thought than the million miles of the firmament!

The text chosen by the composer did not appear to follow the author’s words only weave a way in and around the paragraph, pulling out key words and phrases, creating a poem from the images. He could imagine doing this himself, making a poem of the text.

This business of time, and how it was to this author,  ‘all about me in the sunshine’, was the same for him. As he read it, he would think of the warm early morning light on the stone façade of the building across the road. He could turn away from his desk and see a quality of glowness that all but stopped his own thoughts of time. This quality of and in things that nature could bestow, even to the inanimate, held a wonder all its own.

And so he had listened several times to this bright, newly fashioned work, enjoying the sustained and acoustic beating of more than eighty voices (he thought) singing in close clusters. And with and against those clusters, were flurries and cascades of high woodwind, as though such figures were birds flocking into the sun on a summer’s sky. This music seemed to be about immanence, existing in the everything of itself, but unlike Jeffries’ reverie music was governed by time, and when finished, with an inconclusiveness that surprised him, would rarely, he felt, ever be performed again.

In all directness I’ve lost my voice.
Enveloped by an irrational fear
of picking up the pen.
Thinking twice about every line.
As we shift and life materializes
before our eyes we find it harder
to say the things worth saying to ourselves.

Calm that beating heart, let it rest.

This life is tumulus.
Like a disappointed teenager
backdoor rebel, your biker
all bruised and blue
the guy who lies to you
out of habit or the girl
who’ll spread her legs
just to make sure beds
stay warm, or the grocer
who’ll stock rotten fruit
to meet the bills or people
who **** for oil, for drugs, for fun.

Disappointed, every last one of them.

So we fight back,
by puffing on our bongs
by disconnecting to our palms
by blasting the music on some large
stereo system, surround sound, or 3D vision
we spray paint on walls, or we fall prey to our whims
we bet on winning three hands straight
or decide we know our own fate,
or some of us just sit,
and wait,
for something, anything to happen
to shatter, to break apart, to give birth to some
black hole that’ll **** it all up and spit out something
back again. Anything we can reshape or begin.

But after chaos comes even more chaos.

And with loss comes anger,
mounted, building, and enraged,
like raised pitchforks chasing town monsters,
oh the horror, some of us might not bare to see it
won’t believe it, or try to bargain it away,
and not feel the earth shake from aftershock.
It’s too difficult to soak it up.
Let’s not tear down what is functioning fine
Just so we can live another lie?
I’m fine with mine, where it rests inside
a mask so well displayed,
that even I believe it some days.

Why change?

The question that lingers on the page,
Stumped by fear of jumping out of comfort zones,
Paralyzed by the thought that home
isn’t where you heart is, but rather,
the space your spirit needs to breathe.

And with that word
the realization of responsibility,
this burden it makes,
this weight that we can’t wait
to throw off to
another day, maybe
another time, maybe
could you keep your voice
down lady? Just after this last drink
baby, and I swear I’ll get back to you,

hey, I want my rite of passage too.

But the world moves too fast,
asks too much, doesn’t know when
to stop, drunk on its own axis,
either get off your *****
or be swept by the tide,
because there’s no where
you can run and hide
no matter how hard you try
you’re gonna have to listen to what you already know.

But guess what happens to people like that?

They grow.

It's during restless nights such as these when my mind is at its optimum state

Where I am able to tap into my psyche to excavate emotions and notions once frozen like nitrate

I feel the temperature rising

Becoming irate

The flamethrower steady mediating while it patiently waits

It has me excited but also afraid

Like tight roping a bridge thats charging a toll I can't afford to pay

Or knowing I overdosed on a drug with no antidote

In order to coast its euphoric waves

Causing my heart to quit its job and my pupils to dilate

As Im dethrone from my throne and thrown inside a crate

To be placed to sleep for an eternity in a tumulus grave

But I smile because they see me as resting

When my soul is wide awake

Even though my body is stiffer then a new pair of shoes

I can spend all day seeking for the truth inside the truth

But I'm terrified of the journey and what I might loose

And the answers

Fearing the exposure and what it could prove

Do I have a halo or horns?

Or maybe both of the two?

I need to swim deeper

So I do

Until my lungs fill with water up to the brim

And burn with white fire hotter then fallen seraphim

But I continue to breast stroke into the abyss

Past the wine jars

The greek paintings

Past cities more lost then the city of atlantis

Past the treasures of the galleon of San Jose

And into the door way of what was took off display

And this will be the place where I will drown

In exchange for discovering what was never meant to be found

An abstract Parallax anagram:
Belvedere Preserved,
Living Gingivitis,
Monochord workbooks,
Tumulus Fungus.

late March, 2022

I found my heart inside a casket
hidden in a burial mound
like some ill begotten mongol khan which time forgot
fermenting on the furthest steppe
near the farthest rim
of outer darkness.
They call it a tumulus
a mound of earth and stone raised over a grave
or graves
I spent thirty some odd years
heaped on top of some thirty thousand thousand some odd incarnations
praying at the altar of the outer darkness-
and then…

I found my heart inside a casket
concealed inside of a pine wood cube - hammered shut with copper nails,
some made of scrap metal, various alloys
6 heaps of chain link
buried in the badlands
47 cents a pound
I pried open the lid with a twelve pound claw hammer
bad hands trying to catch a falling knife
copper penny nails
flying through the air
glinting off of the dakota winter sun
like copper drops of rain
or six heaps of chain link
or a thousand handfuls of cracked rice
heaved into the matrimony skies.
like a dowry full of penny nails.

20 hours deep inside a drunk tank,
Columbia County Jail, Lake City, Fl -
somewhere near the Georgia border.
“I wouldn’ be doin’ that son, could be bad for your health!”
was the kind reply I was given by a guard
was the verbal response i heard
stretched out and tanned over a deep southern drawl;
a southern dialect only three degrees above pigeon english.
I had been pounding on the doors and the walls and the windows.
“LET ME THE **** OUT OF HERE!!!”
was the tune I played upon the flute and timbrel
was the serenade I sung for the unholy guards of the graveyard shift
I was standing there
praying there
pacing there
back and forth there
suicide watch
screaming there,
shivering in a turtle suit.

That was a long time ago.
The northern Florida Sun shown
white hot like molten iron alloys
hammered flat across an anvil
northern Florida sand
bakeoven hot beneath my bare feet
walking my shirtless sunburned skin to the state store
malt liquor
microwaved baking soda
30 milligrams of percocet
Wild Irish Rose
top ramen and eggs
breakfast lunch and dinner
every single night.
we were spinning and smoking so hard
we couldn't feel all the Wild Irish Thorns
cutting up our throats.

scared my dad so bad he took the next red eye down.
following morning he's walking right through the trailer door.
I was sitting there
on the couch there
with the dog there
in the dark there
10 hours deep inside an acid trip
he booked clear to the back
took a B-line for the family bible
he had given me to keep safe.
life uses many gears and levers to gauge the measure of a man.
Leather binding and the book of Leviticus all chewed half to hell.
The dog wasn’t to be blamed.
Six weeks this side of the dope sickness blues
and i’ve never seen such disappointment on a man’s face.
The grass outside the side window was covered in the morning dew;
glassy
like gray-blue ice
gleaming and
steaming in the
hot iron
northern Florida sun.

We buried our hearts in a pine wood box
beneath the basement of a rail station freight house
converted some time ago
into a single family home
nestled in the blue ridge
south of the Poconos
in the shadow of a slate hill
Slate belt, Eastern PA.
Sometimes it's easier that way
laying motionless in the dark.  
Where only the pulse
of the blood
in my neck
would betray the fact
that I wasn’t just a wax statue.  

By: Jordan Gee

"I know an agent, who knows your man, who has a machine to do the job in no time."

… I'll book a flight then

This time,
I’ll sail on a freighter cabin,
Back,
Have a B&B waiting
In a familiar town,
In County Cavan.

I’ll visit with my Uncle,
Drink ***-boiled water
From tea-ringed mugs.
I’ll pour out questions,
Wear an extra layer
To stay the chill,
With my muddy wellies
On his cement floor,
In his soot-walled room,
Behind the  sky-blue, wood rot door;
With the road encroaching,
As never before.
A light dangles from the end of a cord,
The tap is just outside the door,
A four burner propane stove
Provides heat to boil and cook.
The Immaculate Heart
Is missing from where it once was,
In the nook, on the wall.

The thistle encrusted lane
Leads up a hill, from behind,
To a natural well,
Where animals watered and grazed.
Beyond, hedgerows of bramble,
With walls of stone,
Delineate the fields;
Seven in all, they called their own.
But seven can’t stay home.
The youngest,
The unchosen one,
Lives there now on his own.

There' s no cold ash
In the open hearth,
Where generations
Died and birthed.
Despite the depth of the walls,
The rusted roof and lifeless stalls,
The whitewash too
Will bleed to earth,
Onto the tumulus of dirt.

... then, I will book a flight

who claims love has never captured you so
recklessly, so blindly that you fear it-
you, who dreams of me in slumber
inking you in your sleep-
i fear too.
i pray for these fireworks to last more than
tonight, more than this sliver of spring
but just as it has barely found it's beginning
i fear it's glowing embers have burnt into
itself. out, into complete darkness,
as if it hardly ever touched the sky,
barely existing even as dreams-
like those that remain fuzzy after a tumulus night of sleep
darling, don't let us be a faded dream;
don't let us fall like dust.
remember what it was to light this earth, to tilt
in blues and violets and gold-
remember the heat and it's electricity, please,
remember it the first time you knew
it was love