Daniel Citro’s Seas / Horse, a set of 28 postcards, is available for sale now in the Opo Books & Objects Store.

Continue to “Mineral”

The Fire Sermon

Siddartha and his monks are gathered around the fire. The day’s begging is done, the meal is eaten; the moist evening air clamors with insects. The monks are squatting in their yellow robes. Even in the heat, they press close to the dying fire, trying to gain some protection from the insects with its smoke. There are nuns among them, too, staring into the flames, though it’s hard to distinguish them. They wear the same voluminous robes. Their heads are shaved and scabby. Their faces are deeply creased. It is mostly older women, the widows, the mothers who have lost children, who take refuge here, with the man with the long fingers and toes and earlobes. They watch him out of the corner of their eyes, wondering if he feels the hunger they feel after just one bowl of rice a day. They want to please him. He looks like all of the other monks, but the group has instinctively ringed him. They really, really want to please him.

Look at the fire. He points, and they all look.

Look at the way it burns. We’re like that. We’re all burning up.

Or maybe there wasn’t a fire at all. Why would there be a campfire in the elephant grasses of northern India? This isn’t fucking Little House in the Big Woods. Maybe they were burning grass fronds to smoke the mosquitoes away from their eyes. Maybe they were watching the body of a rich man getting cremated, the stacks and stacks of wood required to turn him to ash. Maybe Siddartha looked at the nuns then and said, We’re burning up even now, just like that guy.

Continue to “Enlightenment”

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8

A storm rolls color around
the mountaintop, sky given over
to the deeply hued.
The river, stirred to sultry,
carves the village up.

Night figures a doorjamb’s red
square. Light above cuts
its stage into a scene.

So what?

I know looking and not
pinning the view.

I’ve been hum-stuck, parallel
to the woodwork,
saying um.

How close to the body
should you hold your hands
when the view pulses, when with each
beat you change
what’s in or in front of you?

Continue to “Blue Machine”

Left with a bandaged hand and a living calf
which she calls dumb one and my sweet,
stroking between its milk eyes, the woman
is not surprised to see November fall upon
the yard, snow steaming from an empty body.
It happened in quiet, rounding a corner
to spot the familiar crouch and intention,
how her father’s face snarls at her so many
years later, how the first blow slid beneath
the shoulder blade, how the palm reader said
“Do not become red,” how we dig feet in
and hold and who will win? She who is called
grandmother and neighbor on the next
farm over, the lost names of daughter and
malyutka. She who licks away fear and closes
the gate. This wolf like all wolves,
this hand a perfect fist in a field of statues.

The weather won’t hold—a sigh of capitalism in the clouds
and everybody is making out on Clark St, which is to say

we funnel our reaching through mouths. At work
on the eighth floor someone films a drama on

corporate fraud and all is vertigo from here. There is
a shortage of bathrooms with a river view, green

in my daughter’s drawing. I am magenta. Last night she
pressed her ear to my belly asked if her brother could be

a parrot, a word she’s learned to mean mistake. I bought
my daughter at an ice rink. It was cute. I paid a lot of money

and a new coat. Sometimes I just want a little mercy,
for the train to open its doors, for the turnstile not to be jammed.

Going home I share a cab with a stranger and god I wish
he had panache but he talks of avian flu and—when the driver slams

for a pigeon—screams to hell with Ukraine! My tax form defines
home as a fixed place where you intend to return.

I want to say I did not fuck the birdman or afterwards
let him flick the flab around my chins and thighs but instead

walked the rest of the way, the wind searing me a name,
the night just light enough to storm by.

Continue to “Russian Grandmother Kills Wolf With Bare Hands”

 

1. [Suspicions Are Even More Suspicious]

The poet’s house is a painting,
                                           the notoriety missing.

I’m going inside myself until the bones of it, brittle as old nails, are replaced with fat new
ligatures greased with midnight fishermen and lost time, the need merely tugging politely
until the damp coat falls and the wardrobe appears reversibly mounted like a trophy
inside what used to be my inheritance,

                      (there’s an industrialist humming
                                                                 generated by ironing his shorts)

but the tears cannot turn back, and the fire cannot turn around, and, like us, they put one
another out, and they pass in the night where the anguish doesn’t need words to pick you
up and take you home, and home is where you’ve always been lonelier with someone
there,

                                                                  its landscape thick with creek,
                      the blackbirds thick with landscape.
                                            (There’s a house inside the canvas.)
                                                                            The poet’s floating house

can’t absorb its vessel’s excess
                                                      (nor anticipate the sinking leaf).

2. [Banjo and Pan Pipes; A Ballad from the Hill Country]

I wasn’t so long ago, on an innocent apron, congealing and
frigid in the ministering wind. I suppose you were still writing
the eulogy, but you don’t have to squeeze that stone to release it.

I sang the Black Walnut’s hoary clawing. The flute someone made
from Sally’s leg-bone traveled through the night that barked in my head.
What’s gone that I need this much? How could weather be so experienced

and still leap out like a thought excited by nothing but itself? I wish I could
live in my thoughts. I sing their confusion 
                                                                            and pluck the strings down.

3. [A Computer Generated Invitation Too Late for Condescension]

I buried my grandmother today. 
                    It was raining a little under the only tree.
                              The sky had fallen off the robin’s Spring hinge.

Possibly it would happen faster if I didn’t do so much, 
                    darling thrush arriving with its hedge luggage
                              on the other side of a cooperative swallow.

I could ask for something contemporary and turn away, 
                    a vacuous burrowing occupation of its light and 
                              insecure hardware. I return to the number two

in search of the first impulse vining above and no more 
                    brilliant mornings can be found there, where I hadn’t 
                              ever been. That’s what was sailing on the lake in my head

all the way to where trafficking performed
                    in tiny violins like a larvae pimp closing, 
                              and hazel-colored bathwater thickened, and
                     
spilling magnificent dither closed itself, 
                    the seedache of unbegetting oscillating, O
                              the way we all move together becomes a bird,

a weightless officer, memorable handshakes,
                    and warm cereal language, if by x you mean y and 
                              delicate water on the fullness where pixilated Chesters

become an untouchable thickness, and the river of the upper torso
                    adjusts a lever behind the right shoulder-blade that raises 
                              then lowers the dual frontal appendages, which may be

considered either arms or wings, depending on the speed of
                    the lever as operated, if by point the lower end towards the earth, 
                              you mean that which is falling deserves to hold the rest above.

4. [There Were Closed Doors Inside the Closed Doors]

I seem to be collecting impulses with a hidden denominator,
common, but frequently fleet. Everyone there was working on a theory
                                 to explain the theories that weren’t working.

(My ovens were not acceptable, but my steam tables were floating off with little wisps of
Manhattan flying from their antennas. More than enough endearments had been collected 
and children were pouring out of their own ears. Golf was played blue and loud.)

There were hummingbirds flying between 
                               the unoccupied rooms. There were rooms

that occupied themselves with emptiness.
                              There were places to go from which you could

not return, and the only space available
                               was the space between spaces.

5. [It Takes Only a Fool’s Native Wisdom to Return]

The wasps were harder to identify than tree surgeons,
                               who didn’t even consider identifying with them.

The garments I wore were buzzing. They led me
                               to an understanding farther north than possible.

You should have seen the herd of eyebrows galloping.
                               [I hold them gently, and they know their promise.]

6. [It’s Not Often Such a Wedding Remains Benign]

Who am I with a broom chasing sparrows?
                               [T-t-t-t-t-urtle luggage blubbers in her lowly fluff church.]

They say ugly. They say hungry. They say no evidence
                               but a milky fog as smooth as the aftertaste of aged cream.

A simple stilled smoke falling away––
                               considerate limbs between us, a thicket of posturing.

You do not know you deliver me and I do not know to what.
                               The desire speaks further because the goal remains silent.

7. [A Life of Patient Excess]

Where then my ephemeral experiments,
                               my tidy drawers of winged samples?

[A breath, too tentative, too slow, to be trembling.]

The dream breaks open in the waking,
                               [if only the elusive meaning would]

and we do not have to believe in a death come softly
                               tough it believes in us and emerges from its belief
                                                              slower than the exhale of stars,

[tiny ice bells ringing in the meadow as a warm breeze stirs].

To breathe with them requires uncertainty
                               and a conclusion larger than the leaf we row to become lovers.

A limited edition set of thirteen frame-ready prints (each approximately 8 X 6 inches) from some of BPR’s most talented contributors, beautifully hand screen printed in Athens, GA by the amazing folks at Double Dutch Press.

Featuring work from Erin Rogers, Amanda Dorsett, the team of Daniel Quinn & Laura Oxendine, Will Dunlap, Claire Stephens, Terri Witek, and Lily Brown, this collection is limited to only 150 numbered copies, so order yours now!

$16 / $2 domestic shipping

 

We’re proud to announce that a limited edition chapzine of “First Shot At Fort Sumter / Possum” is available for purchase in our Online Store—while supplies last.

Terri Witek is the author of Exit Island, The Shipwreck Dress, Carnal World , Fools and Crows, Courting Couples (Winner of the 2000 Center for Book Arts Contest) and Robert Lowell and LIFE STUDIES: Revising the Self . Her collaborations with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes have been featured in galleries or site-specific projects in New York City, Los Angeles and elsewhere. A professor of English at Stetson University, her summer faculty positions have included the West Chester Poetry Conference, the Prague Summer Literary Program and the DisQuiet program in Lisbon, where she runs “The Fernando Pessoa Game.”

Ian Campbell provided digital assistance with “First Shot at Fort Sumter / Possum.”