September 2016, an Inside Out Journal
Dale Smith
$5
Faded leaves hang limp in evening sun. Worried cyclists keep close to curb. Pale sky’s scrim a crib holding no one. Dead things collect in words. To speak of origin brings a quiet rain to ruined global interface. Like messages from stars, light years distant. To grieve or share caravan soul worry. Hold tightly to rafts, the current flows outward, naked, disastrous fool. A beard and exposed torso. Five-days old, born in passage over Mediterranean shame. Image flashes beyond borders. Simultaneity of needs washed clean by hunger’s devotion.
Stand in trashy yellow field
where
dirty underwear plastic garbage
eat rations a fate or ratio of
circumstance the Navigant sun
north
lunar pulse of waves widening
long
mother to love openly sideways
enter Lesbos on orange life
vest already
squeezed no air lungs like dry
leaves grow still
rocks there are cameras to
mediate
one’s
digital window. The subway car is overheated. A child cries. Drunk white man
covered in face tattoos screams. Beyond one a membrane prevents seeing through
remnants of oneself. Not even the color of a concept can restore the ore or ire
animating crisis. The dead are not as good. It is not okay.February 2019
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Cover image by Stacy Blint
Dale Smith lives in Toronto, Ontario, where he teaches at Ryerson University. His writing appears in Brick, Brooklyn Rail, Chicago Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. He is an editor, with Robert J. Bertholf, of An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson. His most recent poetry is Sons published by Knife Fork Book in 2017.
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