ryan fitzpatrick
$5
DODO
(Raphus cucullatus)
Nothing vanishes, is gone ever. One might believe that there is nothing new under the sun, but something briefly flickers in and out of sight. Eyewitness accounts doctor a cooling account of the world left strewn like magnetic tape spooled out. One might build a shell from a hail of gunfire or hide behind the charred folly of the law. One might fall asleep. Shooting bison from a train window, one collects but a range of ghosts, faint in the way one might think of drainage.
There are trees cut down in worship of the stump. There are bands of iron and bronze that turn dates forward, hanging from the stump of a mast. In a green dawn, one must commune with more than one’s eyes passing over the ghost shape of a tree. In an object dawn, one must retain one’s coat of arms with the faintness of two smouldering stumps to measure the temples of God. One must stare into tamer versions of the sun where soft light denies the mythological.
It is loathsome, when the weight one must shovel reappears as shit. Each channel is a fraud of water. Each season a two-note sound. One must stretch and train each procedure and checklist to conform one’s self. How much energy does one have? How does one gather? Don’t be discouraged by the lack of answers, since one can train the eye to locate everything.
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
September 2024
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
ryan fitzpatrick is the author of four books of poetry, including the recent Sunny Ways (Invisible, 2023) and Coast Mountain Foot (Talonbooks, 2021). Their first non-fiction book Ace Theory, a book-length essay in fragments about asexuality, will be published by Book*Hug Press in 2025. They are the 2024-25 Writer-in-Residence in the University of Alberta’s Department of English and Film Studies.
This is fitzpatrick’s fifth above/ground press title, after STANZAS #25 (“further revisions,” July 2001), Adolesce (2005), dealingwithit.gif (2015) and Dang Me (2020). Report from the fitzgerald Society, Vol 1. No. 1, appeared in 2023.
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