The first thing you’ll likely notice, glancing at the two poems by Benjamin Krusling that appear in Issue Fifteen, are the spaces around the punctuation. Insinuations of emptiness, like deep breaths accompanying the text, swaddle the commas and slow down a stream of question marks. Without these extra gaps, the intensity of Krusling’s language — the first-person declarations, the imagery of social and somatic strain — might be too much for us to process. In these poems Krusling gives us our world in all its overwhelming urgency and then gives us a break. Read them online today.
what kind of person can watch images going by | Poetry
BENJAMIN KRUSLING
as history – so my life
goes around again , irreversibly . it spirals
upward like newspaper , celluloid . the stakes
rise and sink – but the ceiling’s so low
I can hardly dream straight . this is the mystery
of art , it seems to wither
to death before you , conceptually ,
when a head is separated
from a shared plane or they find
someone else’s teeth
in a leg on the gravel . of another era ,
this kind of speech . your inclination
to speak – from another time . now ,
all that love for objects . nothing works .
even rain . depleted uranium .
you put a wedge inside the thought
of ganging up on space and –
can’t sing about it either . the counter-
revolution of property , the shoot-to-kill
quadcopter , the meaning
of the world , the heart and lung
and liver . sometimes I feel it
around me , naturally , a new
attitude . with water in it . I go back
and forth , without exception ,
to the very first womb . ergonomics .
bushmasters , alchemy . the ghetto ,
the difference . I go back to the original split .
I choose to go back .
it’s like I’m still swallowing formula
and wondering how to move
the impersonal and the mythic , ok , I wish | Poetry
BENJAMIN KRUSLING
that was never really meant to happen
I still want a part of desperate living
even with the jaws getting sick of general pacifism
but that’s all in an evening screening . to be in
the USA no less , most mysticism seems inadequate to it ,
so whatever’s happening at least bears the ripped muscle
of a journey through a few paid-for programs . and I asked ,
I remember asking , about investments , financial instruments ,
and I got a few jokes about coca cola . you don’t want me to ball ???????
? ? ? ? ? ? I thought , fine , I’ll have to do it different , then a decade
of real episodes of real madness , which is right ,
all the anger in it , chopped up about gossip , the roots
and branches of the white pact through which compensation
falls forward . this is all a good body can do , keep up
with itself , with its expensive sexual capacity . I get so mad
sometimes , vamps , and I know I do that shit myself !
I’ve been talking so much and time still won’t open up
I told myself a story about a friend who did me wrong
and a river of blood just ran out the door