new from above/ground press: Clinging & Grasping, by Franklin Bruno

Clinging & Grasping
Franklin Bruno
$5

Anamorphic Table

I crossed the room and the room stayed self-
Identical, although it had changed.

I went outside, though only briefly,
And found it pleasant, also only briefly.

Dusk, still air. What we need’s a Shazam
For plant life. My father was afraid of fog.

So was mine. I think about his colleague
In a sanatorium, wonder how to contact

His daughter who cares for a schoolmate
Who fell off a mountain. “I am not feeling

Myself today.” But how would you know?
It’s a trick: a room is not an entity.

Dice connect two fields of mathematics:
Solid geometry and probability. Each face

Must be equally likely to come up
And this constrains their design.

The regular polyhedra, of which there are five,
Are elegant traditional solutions.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
April 2021
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Franklin Bruno is the author of The Accordion Repertoire (poetry, Edge Books), the chapbooks MF/MA (Seeing Eye) and Policy Instrument (Lame House), and Armed Forces (criticism, in Continuum/Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series). He has released 20 albums of original songs as one-third of Nothing Painted Blue, under his own name, and (currently) as frontman of The Human Hearts. Raised in Southern California’s Inland Empire, he now lives and writes in Jackson Heights, Queens. A second chapbook through above/ground press is forthcoming.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com