ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Five Poems
by Aby Kaupang




what closes in on me, concerns me alone

this is my deaths I’m anxious for
but there you are

you too    living

with a life unable—unable to parry
unable to flee    unable to retreat—peering
through the window (both wall & sacred
 
line)   waiting for illumination
or at slightest    defense

from the bone carrier offing in your alley

death being a code, the possibly oncoming

is delicious
if its not an ambush
of gadgets    then its something like it

latent in apparent
tranquility and oh blessed assurance

this anxiety’s abysmal    my lack
of lack

and then a landmine

the hand gropes everywhere
with no front line
                  to be confronted

in my confinement    I said “god

hem me in”    what can I do
with my mono-eyed loving

bullet unbearable   enormous
& frail at night    these candelas

of attention
are heaving—

if I believe in other worlds    the dead

are not in this    earthly, this empty
tied to this earth    this canopy this
push-pin earth    other-worldly the pain

I thought    entering this    that I might
evaporate    like The Loved evaporates
and leaves this earth in palliation

Death’s voice    when Death came
was a filibuster of the fomenting screech
locking the courts of my earth

if I believe in other worlds
then I have want for trespass    other worlds
not my earth now    but the Loved’s

we go to the garden of swords and fire    and go
and post our signs of melting about it    we are timid
in our thawing spot    faltering if we stop there

there    the inconceivable surprise, living
living with it    the shock    and our hand falls

a turn of a wheel a slight of eye and the whole
spinning doe of a whirl flips into a ravine

is it any wonder
this blip isn’t less livid

even the underworld articulates emergency
and snarling and poppies startling
in their sudden orangeness

these are sights I could leave for
accidentally—my driving gaze drawn
to a plosive upward bank of poppy

and trash and glamorously
smashing vessels nested
in car in body in cell in souly bits of bloom

I look for Sue

stem and sudden Sue
not seep or splay but crack
neck