UChicago's Oldest Literary Magazine
I am looking out the window with my classical on as I ponder the rigmaroles of existence discussing such with the most fascinating person I know.
Every time I feel I’ve made a valid point or observation during my ongoing convo I like to whip off my glasses to add further emphasis
while highlighting a point that’s been made salient and to add further punctuating resonance
All night (when isn’t it night?) the flat fields sleep unsound,
the megacities spit and thrum with their overdrive generators,
babies shawled in naked terror howl for 24-hour shifts in test chambers.
Earth is round the way a cattle prod is round.
Electricity churns and spits, sprinting through Hell World, block after block.
Read More Poetry: “Prison Planet,” by Zack CarsonA poet I know lives on Noyes Street.
Not Dogma Drive
where what we see
is what we get,
but a neighborhood of wavicles, oscillations, uncertainties,
His final breaths
served as a reminder
that dying had been kept
from me all these years: Yes,
I wept, but more
because of the ecstatic
unbraiding that accompanied
the irregular pattern
of rapid gasps and
apnea
innervates, selfsame bodies
half-built causeways birth still water
sunk the veiled North
Sea moss, our love: a cutlass sharpened
water-ice winnows visions of solemn service
Really, the old guy impersonated
himself, the rolling eye and teeth-bared grimace
straight out of silent movies. He’d known
vaudeville too, and, in the old sense,
burlesque. Gestures from Yiddish theater—
The unnamed narrator coats the stones like rain. He says: There is logos inside the logo, logic in the log, but watch the long-sleeved willow in autumn as it sways: willow, hold your suede over the colossus of loss, your shadow strides the forest seeking seeking. He says: Where the blackbirds fire songs a story […]
Read More Poetry: “Story,” by Giles Goodlandyou think of hot evenings watching cottontails scatter
at the yip of waking coyotes
you think of watching clouds of heat lightning
glimmer like pearly gates
you think of baseball fishing in the pond
Startled awake, I left my frayed brain
resting in its head-case as I floated away
up to the ceiling, out of the long window
into the northern hardy redbud just outside
beginning its flower, tight pink nodules
In Newark, spring opens its mouth, yawns
across the Manhattan skyline, like a promise.
Yesterday, I asked what love was beyond
laughter skipping on broken vinyls, hands
on the steering wheel, beyond umbrellas. I
Euphony Journal 