TWO POEMS by Caylin Capra-Thomas
TIME SURE FLIES WHEN YOU’RE NOT LIVING UP TO YOUR POTENTIAL
So, everything failed. The jabbed-iron trees flamed out
in spectacular failure along the ragged range. Forecast
failed. The pollster that glistered turned huckster. And
the memory of that ex who called you petit bouchon
failed to reassure that you once loved wreckful and reckless
and in a foreign tongue. All around you now Florida fails pinkly
and by voracious flora. The lizard who burned or drowned
hot-tubbing in your hot coffee failed perfectly, curled into
an eternal question mark, little fingers clenched, dukes up.
If death is the body’s failure, it is also its final fuck you.
Which has to count for something. Which has to be a win.
LIGHTNING SUSPECTED IN DEATHS OF HORSES
I want to take you to the black-mud spring pasture
where six horses fell and did not get back up.
I don’t know if they were dark or dappled—
I wasn’t there. I read it in a newspaper in Vermont,
sitting at the counter of a diner that no longer
exists. Lightning Suspected in Deaths of Horses—
small article in a bottom corner, not much
more information than that. It struck me—
I’m not trying to be funny—I carried
that headline around until it became a slogan
although I’m not sure what I’d been sold.
Maybe this: the sky opens, you kneel
and beg its mercy and it doesn’t make
one lick of difference. Or, light appears
and your life is transformed. Finally getting
exactly what you’ve asked for all along:
a shift in luck, sudden brilliance, your body
lit, electric, your own enough to let it go.
SUMMER TRIANGLE by M.J. Bender
Deneb in the Swan; Altair in the Eagle; Vega in the Lyre—he brought home a woman
at three in the morning and told me to get out of bed and go sit on the front porch.
I listened to her having an orgasm—
a chord, a jazz chord: three thirds on top of the root.
It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not—it’s feeling.
Vega, in the Lyre of Orpheus, a double-double that looks like two stars but is four,
two and two. Diminished or augmented. The sheets were stained in the morning when I was
let back in the house. So I bought my own mattress and put it in another room. Lyric: one
strum over four strings vibrating simultaneously. One afternoon I took a walk
down the street to buy a half gallon of milk. When I came home I found him
with a new woman. Both were naked in my bed, on my mattress,
under my covers in my room that was separate from his. Of the first magnitude
or brighter or darker.
THE NATURE OF LOVE by Aaron Belz
I disagree with you about the nature of love
and by extension about art or rather
the role of form in art for while abstraction
can delight the senses it is not sustainable
or repeatable and what humans need is more
like a glass of water not only upon waking
but one at lunchtime and one later on
in the evening repeating like a clock
that doesn’t need winding but ticks along
uninspired unexploding with no mystery at all
that is simply there in its place so I suppose
I also disagree with you about life and its
purpose I mean can you imagine if breath
or pulse were to have an ecstatic epiphany no
there is no ecstasy no explosion no light
piercing darkness once and for all but just
this steady lighting of the lamps of progress
and of moving on and yes it’s predictable
and that’s not only its chief characteristic
but its crowning virtue so make your art
in form that iterates generally and gently
rather than in spasms that hate themselves
and in doing so you will find the love that
plods dully on and it will bear that weight
in you of course I say all this and want
to mean it but in fact I live in urgent sadness