An event like birth or bike riding
Poems by Leslie McIntosh, Oksana Maksymchuk, and Ethan Seeley, plus new Mentions
Issue Sixteen poets Leslie McIntosh, Oksana Maksymchuk, and Ethan Seeley confront us — as we are so often confronted today — with images, mysterious and gripping, powerful even without context or conceptual framework. A hummingbird caught in a guitar string. Shards of glass levitating. Smoke that, toyotalike, crashes into the mist. Enter these poets’ worlds and delight in their language.
still life in necromancy | Poetry
LESLIE MCINTOSH
What makes the dead turn
Beyond decomposition
Is mystery is radical is
Teleportation is a man coming
Back to life is a toddler falling
From a playground swing
Zenith-spat smartly into mud
Seeing all around lose her
In descent puddle and dirt find her
A worm forced from home by rain
Wriggles closer to her ear saying
Baby is a deer knowing no
Language but understanding
What it can safely eat
Turning all the rest aside
The hummingbird caught
In a guitar string instantly
Released into the authority
Of blue. Unquestioning.
An event like birth or bike riding
OKSANA MAKSYMCHUK
I imagine it being true
You remained in bed
shards of glass
levitating, like a sparkling
tapestry
Sound asleep
despite rolling thunderclaps
flashes of alien
fast-moving light
In the morning
when the search party arrived
they found you, index finger
marking a place in a book
a white lily
at your bedside
filling the room with a fragrance
and your face
still a child’s
bearing a mark of a kiss
It’s All Coming Back to Me Now | Poetry
ETHAN SEELEY
The hills are facts. Assembling.
Toyotas are crawling, antlike,
all over their hairy backsides.
The ants vote with their pocket-
books. Lacking pocketbooks,
they are disenfranchised. So,
they vote with their feet.
Our feet head for the hills. The hills
are looking very factual tonight.
The mist descends, monsterlike,
to knock at the doors of the houses
pouring smoke out their several
chimneys. The smoke, toyotalike,
crashes into the mist. The houses
knock at their own doors. For every
heartache there is an equal and
opposite satisfaction. That’s why Jesus
invented country-western radio. To say
I’m so lonesome I could cry or If
you’re gonna cheat on me, don’t
cheat in our hometown, when we can’t.
When we’re traveling, particlelike
through distant hills. Of course, I’m
speaking here of the age of hills.
Haunting images also erupt from this issue’s extremely abbreviated reviews. Read on for a seven-foot tall garbageman, black cowboy boots with a purple velvet suit, a giant penis monster, a half-dozen CPR dummies, and a three-foot-long eel carcass.
Foreclosure Gothic
FICTION
In FENCE editor Harris Lahti’s debut novel, houses aren’t the only things that are torn apart and rebuilt. With tight, lyrical prose, Lahti follows a father and son duo, Vic and Junior Greener, as they flip foreclosed homes around the Hudson Valley. The two meet an assortment of mysterious characters, like the seven-foot tall garbageman who leaves a grease stain when his head hits the Greeners’ ceiling, or the wealthy, incestuous couple who may or may not keep their mother chained up, or the twins with shotguns who confront Vic to try to get their uncle’s smut collection back from the Greeners’ latest flip, only for Vic to pay them to help rip up the carpet. There isn’t much closure in Foreclosure Gothic, only a reminder that, while none of us ever go home again, we never really leave it either.
Robert Warf
Autoportrait
BOOK
An early work of autofiction so effective that it renders its successors all but unnecessary, French artist Édouard Levé’s slim 2005 volume consists of nothing but statements about the author: “I sing badly, so I don’t sing. Because I am funny people think I’m happy. I want never to find an ear in a meadow.” The sentences, set down almost, though not entirely, at random, are detached and flat, but produce an almost miraculously coherent effect. As protagonist, Levé both surprises and grows into a familiar type: the artist struggling with despair. Levé took his own life in 2007, ten days after turning in his following book, Suicide, which elaborated on a story in Autoportrait. But here, you can see him puzzling through possible reasons to live. “Some day I will wear black cowboy boots with a purple velvet suit.”
Aaron Labaree
Eddington
FILM
An almost palpably self-satisfied Ari Aster frames his latest overstuffed foray as a Western from the very first shot: a lone man shuffling past tumbleweeds into a town at the edge of civilization. But this Covid period piece is also garishly festooned with “2020” motifs, from surgical masks, iPhones, and water-leaching data centers to hypocritical Black Lives Matter protesters and a socially distanced fundraiser where Pedro Pascal slaps Joaquin Phoenix (twice). Then Antifa flies in on a private plane. The film made me long for the comparatively subtler Beau Is Afraid and its giant penis monster.
Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece
GovDeals.com
MARKETPLACE
This municipal auction platform with a bare-bones, Craigslist-style interface offers a welcome, albeit strange, respite from the excesses and pop-up ads that plague most online shopping experiences. The site describes itself as a “liquidity services marketplace,” providing a centralized portal for offloading government surplus, though it is impossible to know the true provenance of whatever item you’re buying, save for the seller and their location. (Whose 1.2-carat marquise diamond ring is this, and are they still looking for it?) Items up for grabs as of this writing include a pallet of years-old MREs (Meals Ready-to-Eat); a half-dozen CPR dummies, clustered together as though languishing in a Boschian hell; and a little white church in rural Illinois with a positively post-apocalyptic interior (starting bid: $19,900).
Claire Christoff
The Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern
TRAVEL
This 87,500-square-foot decommissioned reservoir, built in 1926, lies underneath Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park, which offers walking trails alongside a mud-colored river and towering overpass supports. Forgotten for years, it reopened in 2016 as a tourist site and performance space called the “Cistern,” a name intended to evoke the monumental Byzantine ruins beneath Istanbul. But the Houston version involves more concrete and more tales of municipal corruption. You can take a guided tour to learn about the city’s history of dubious water sanitation infrastructure, including a memorable anecdote about a three-foot-long eel carcass clogging a downtown pipe. To demonstrate the facility’s seventeen-second echo, the guide encouraged us to scream into the musty darkness. “Leave it all inside the Cistern!” she yelled, as tourists from Dallas howled beside me.