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An Excerpt from "Oregon Confetti" by Lee Oser

10/4/2017

Accoutered in a bespoke suit and an open-collar broadcloth shirt, Kyle Toke stood in his driveway, watching the spectacle unfold. He observed it with impressive sangfroid. He was, however, distracted long enough that his wife had time to prepare herself. Mary gained the precious moments she needed to recover her wits, to exit her front door, and to conceal her panic behind the transcendent shock of watching her tax dollars at work. She’d even managed to put on a pair of blue jeans, but she’d neglected to change out of my Christmas flannel. I racked my brain and concluded that Kyle had probably seen me wearing it. He gave his wife a peck on the cheek and glared at my house. Meanwhile the police were beginning to depart the neighborhood. At last, when the Shums had suffered the worst their enemies could hope for, when their dignity was annihilated and they had groveled in the dirt like human pigs and thanked their tormentors and retreated broken into their pathetic smashed-up sty, Kyle hauled a bag from out of his shiny new black Range Rover and headed in, Mary skipping at his heels.

By the time things settled down across the street, it was getting towards seven o’clock and I was busy trimming my handsome beard. The gallery didn’t open until ten, but I wanted to avoid driving all the way back across town after dropping off the kid. I had already selected an outfit for the day. I was putting away the electric razor when three jarring raps on the front door announced a visitor. I jogged downstairs in my pajama bottoms and there was Kyle Toke, invading my porch with a baby’s car seat dangling in one monstrous paw. In the car seat was my Christmas flannel.

“Hey, Dev,” he said, as I opened the door a crack. “You got a minute?”

“Hey, Kyle. Wow. A car seat! Thank Mary for me, will you? That was a helluva scene across the street, huh?”

“Oh, that,” he said, pushing open the door sufficiently to park the car seat inside the house. “Happens all the time. It’s what they call a John Doe invasion. It’s perfectly legal.”

“How is that legal?”

“All it takes is a D.A. and a judge who plays ball. Besides, they’re just Asians.”

On the threshold of my home we stood chin to chin. His pleasant blue eyes were scanning me for signs that my interests were running counter to his. I retaliated by focusing my attention as conspicuously as possible on his big bald dome. On close examination, his ears were surprisingly small and even a little on the dainty side. One of them bore a silver hoop the size of a quarter. I tilted my head as if contemplating a bid at a peculiar auction.

“They’re just Asians?”

He grinned sociably but a lot of muscle was brooding under his carefully managed exterior.

“Mary said something about a family emergency? You doing a little babysitting?”

“What’s this about, Kyle?”

“What’s it about? To be honest, I have a very simple question about you and my wife. She said you lent her this shirt when she helped you last night?”

He was swinging my Christmas flannel back and forth like a thurible.

“As a matter of fact, she did. I guess she has nephews or something. Anyway, she was a big help. I really appreciated it.”

I took the shirt and tossed it in the vicinity of the coffee table, where it knocked over the gin bottle, which rolled over the table’s edge as I started a Hail Mary, checked myself, and watched as it crashed unbroken onto the floor and spun over and over in our direction.

“Does the baby drink martinis?”

“Your wife helped me. You can ask her what happened. The car seat is most considerate.”

“Why don’t you show me the baby?”

“Look, I’m in a rush, Kyle.”

He grabbed my arm and I shook it loose. I swore to myself I would break his nose if he tried it again.

“Listen, Dev. I don’t mind you courting my wife. Not in the least. What I do mind is you sneaking around behind my back. All I ask is that you be straight with me. I’m a good friend to my friends, if you know what I mean. Mary says she told you we have an agreement. Lots of people do. This isn’t 1950, you know. So please let’s not get stuck in the past. It isn’t healthy. People fall for those old illusions and then reality chops off their head.”

His right hand came down with a quick hard chop onto the broad meaty palm of his left. Then he grinned from ear to ear like the charming fellow he was.

“There really is a baby in the house, Kyle. A family emergency, like your wife said.”

Upstairs in his crib Virgil started bawling on cue. Kyle Toke heard it and actually blushed. I was impressed.

We are accepting Pre-Orders for Oregon Confetti, which is scheduled to be released November 10th, 2017.

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Writing Through The Curves: Letting Go of the Pressure

9/11/2017

11 Comments

By Angela Cybulski

Tip #1: Let go of the pressure.

If you’re a writer you’ve undoubtedly heard or read some variation of this standard prescription for writing success: anywhere from 2 to 6 hours daily must be spent writing or the writer simply IS NOT – either a writer or writing.

No doubt for some writers this Rx is just what the doctor ordered – i.e. the writer possesses the sort of lifestyle, temperament, and stamina that allow for that kind of daily time-on-task, and can survive on 4 or 5 hours sleep a night while still accomplishing all of the other myriad tasks of a busy family and work life.

But for other writers, even seasoned ones, this prescription could prove fatal and create a type of toxic pressure that shuts down the possibility of living an authentic writing life before it even starts.

The truth is that not all writers are cut from the same cloth. Various factors contribute to one’s ability to commit to so many hours a day, or even every day, to work on a writing project. And when life starts reeling off major curveballs, an overly demanding writing schedule can create debilitating stress around something that should be enjoyable and life-giving. This is why I advise writers to discern a more REALISTIC, and less stressful, schedule that allows you to keep flexing your writing muscles while still allowing you to attend to the have-to’s in your life and which respects your unique writing temperament. Doing so can make the difference between moving forward (albeit at a snail’s pace) and abandoning your writing altogether.

But how do you get started discerning a suitable way to let go of the pressure? Take a lesson from the ball park. Adjusting practice schedules and rehab routines for injuries is a dynamic that plays out over and over across major league baseball, with unique differences depending upon each player’s situation and need.

(Photo credit: Tony Gutierrez / AP; San Diego Union Tribune)

For example, former Los Angeles Angels star pitcher Jared Weaver was put on the disabled list a few years back for an elbow fracture and so was unable to continue his usual epic pitching schedule and performance. He needed to heal from the injury, work through rehab, and enter into a graduated practice schedule that was appropriate to managing this very serious curveball. Putting him on the same intense daily practice schedule All-Star teammate Mike Trout was managing would not have been an appropriate practice for Weaver at the time; in fact, it would have destroyed him. He needed to readjust his expectations about what he could and could not do in light of the curveball, while still staying in the game. In other words, he needed an individualized prescription that worked for him.

The point is that things change, often drastically. Ball players know this and they deal with the curves accordingly. Sometimes they're benched for an entire season because of the intensity of the curves they’re dealing with. Why can’t we writers cut ourselves some slack and reorient our vision and our schedule in consideration of the way our ability to work has changed?

The key to letting go of the pressure is to acknowledge something in your life has shifted and figure out how to modify your practice to stay in the game. It may not look like what OTHER writers are doing, but that’s not the point. The point is to do what works for YOU.

So, if you’re struggling with the curves and close to despairing of living an authentic writing life, ask yourself this question: Before your life took on the velocity and complexity of piloting a Stealth bomber, how often and for how long were you able to write? If your typical 3 hours every weeknight has suddenly become impossible, can you write for 90 minutes two or three times a week instead? Or if you were writing for an hour every morning before you went to work, can you try cutting back to 15 or 30 minutes several days a week? Taking some of the pressure off may just make it possible for you to keep writing through whatever difficult situation(s) is demanding the majority of your time, attention and energy.

In my case, before the curves started coming in hard and fast I was writing for 15-20 minutes nearly every morning, often more on some weekends . . .

(Wait! Do I hear snickering and snorting? The prelude to incredulous laughter? Before you start wondering why you are reading this and what kind of writer I could possibly be at that commitment level, do yourself a favor and check out Barbara DeMarco-Barrett’s brilliant and wholly unique book Pen On Fire: A Busy Woman’s Guide To Igniting The Writer Within. The book changed my writing life: Barbara’s approach is that a book CAN BE written in just 15 minutes a day. I haven’t seen this advice in any other book on writing. And guess what? It works. Because it focuses on the main goal – COMMITMENT – and removes the major obstacle –PRESSURE – to living an authentic writing life. In a little over a year, I wrote nearly 300 pages of my novel, and I didn’t even write every day. And if you happen to be a guy, don’t let the title of Barbara’s book deter you from reading it. It’s hands-down one of the best books on the writing life out there and the guidance is applicable to every busy writer.)

Now, as I was saying . . .

. . . at one point the curves came in hard and fast and made even those precious 15 minutes nearly impossible. Like Weaver, the first thing I had to do was to make peace with the fact that THINGS HAD CHANGED, my game had changed. I couldn’t go on writing as I had been. This acceptance is essential to letting go of the pressure, both the pressure you place on yourself and the perceived pressure the “industry” places on you.

The next step was to come up with a new writing Rx that was appropriate for me. I came up with a plan to write for several hours a few weekends a month. These days got blocked out on my calendar and I made a promise to myself to set some strict boundaries to protect this time. This meant saying “no” to some – but not all – invitations and events. Remember: no one is going to come up to you with a silver tea tray and serve up hours for you to write in. You need to take the time, steal it if you have to, and make it your own. This can be done, provided you make peace with the reality that things have changed and let go of the pressure that comes from trying to follow an Rx not suited to your needs. You may not be able to control the curveballs coming your way, but you CAN control yourself and how you approach the challenges they present. Look for niches of time that work best for your writing process needs and your unique temperament. And don’t laugh off something so small as 15 minutes just because it doesn’t “look like” what you think qualifies as real writing time. I’m proof a book can come out of miniscule increments of time.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember in negotiating letting the pressure off is that you promise not to beat yourself up if you CAN’T do it. That means that if you’ve blocked off a certain time to write, but the baby cries and you need to tend her, DO IT. If your nephew’s wedding is on that weekend and attending it means you won’t write until three weeks from now, go to the wedding. If you're thoroughly wiped out from dealing with the curves and desperately need a nap, take one. Guess what? Your book will survive and will be waiting when you get back. Life happens. The key here is to be realistic and protect the time against less important commitments and distractions.

If your life or your body are in complete turmoil, chances are you have enough pressures and worries weighing on you – don’t let your writing project be one of them. Keep working, but get pragmatic: let the pressure off, come up with a plan of action for dealing with the curves, and move forward with a changed approach to the game. Eventually things will return to whatever your normal is, or there will be a new normal. Either way, following outdated or useless prescriptions inappropriate for your condition doesn’t help you. Focus on what will and move forward.

What are some of the ways you have found to let the pressure off so you could continue working on your creative project even amidst major life changes? I’d love to hear what has or has not worked for you and how you’ve been able to let go of the pressure so that you can stay in the writing game. Perhaps someone else who is struggling can benefit from your strategy!

This is part one of a six-part series. You can find the series introduction here, and you can find successive entries here:

Tip #2: Find a Place Apart
Tip #3: Stay Connected

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Wiseblood's 2017 Fundraiser was a success!

9/5/2017

2 Comments

Joshua Hren

Friends of Wiseblood,

Your donations have surpassed our original goal of $15,000. A slew of eleventh hour gifts pushed us even beyond $17,000! It is right and good for us to celebrate this, as these funds will raise Wiseblood to a new level of operation, especially in terms of publicity and distribution. I assure you that the celebration, coupled with countless prayers of gratitude, will soon give way to work.

In a recent interview with Catholic World Report I ended by insisting that "we ought to be tirelessly making and steering new naviculam, literary vessels that can navigate our contemporary waters, delivering the Catholic vision in an idiom that makes the moral depth of our heritage compelling, gives dramatic representation to the presence of grace as it appears in nature, and is charged with the beauty that shocks us out of ourselves and brings us to worship God’s goodness and submit to His truth." We have long looked for ways by which we can expand our readership, and now we have the means to pursue this expansion in concrete ways. Moving forward we seek not so much to increase the number of books we bring into being each year, as three or four carefully-chosen titles is just right for us at this present time. However, through your donations, we will be able to give each book we publish broader reach, thereby allowing us to do justice to these very fine novels, poetry collections, and monographs.

Thank you for giving.

We are grateful to be able to give you good things to read,

Joshua

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Wiseblood Books 2017 Fundraising Campaign: The Literature You Save May Be Your Own!

7/12/2017

1 Comment

by Joshua Hren

A little bit of our work

Wiseblood Books began four years ago in response to a visible vacuum in our culture: the Catholic (and catholic!) literary culture of the previous century had waned, fiction exploring eternal questions had petered out, and yet the need for literature that possesses a sacramental vision of reality had only increased. We saw the good work being done by literary magazines such as Dappled Things, and saw also how difficult it was for authors whose work was charged with a Christian vision to locate a publisher.

Four years later, I am simultaneously proud and humbled to be able to say that as of June, 2017, we have filled a small corner of that vacuum with twelve fiction titles, six poetry titles, four monographs, and two works of literary criticism.

Launching and sustaining a small press requires a fortitude that borders on pigheaded stubbornness. It means countless late nights at the desk, as well as a dangerous willingness to take risks so that brilliant new books may be brought into being. While Wiseblood Books has so far been able to create and distribute rich, well-reviewed books--including our “constitutional document,” Dana Gioia’s The Catholic Writer Today--on a tiny budget, your support will help keep us independent and vital. Supporting a small press is an act of gravity-defying kindness but it is also a necessity; without your donations we will simply be unable to forge a timely yet enduring idiom in the Catholic literary tradition.

We’re running a fundraiser in the hopes of raising $15,000, which would be our operating budget through the middle of 2018. This is our first fundraiser since 2013, when we raised a meager $10,000. We’ve accomplished a lot with a shoestring budget, but now but now we need to build a solid foundation to prepare the way for the next phase of Wiseblood’s mission.

Louis, Angela, Charles, and Joshua

Our plans for the funds we raise are concrete and touch all aspects of the press, from staffing to book production, marketing, and distribution. Your donation will allow us to supplement the current stipend for our Director of Marketing, Charles Schmitt, so that he can assume full-time work, making important advances in our marketing and distribution. He has already demonstrated a remarkable capacity for the work he is doing; now we need to ensure that he can stay on full time! We also plan to use funds raised to allow our Managing Editor, Angela Cybulski, to work full-time alongside Charles. Angela is our most experienced editor, with a very impressive resume in academia and professional editing. Her full-time attention is vital to maintaining our high standard of literary excellence as we push to grow Wiseblood in new ways. With Charles and Angela fully on board, our titles will find broader readership, and in this way, the leaven of our authors’ fine work will elevate the culture.

Your donation to our campaign will also help us prepare the fiction and poetry titles we are currently working on for our 2018 publication calendar and increase the visibility of three forthcoming monographs in our successful Wiseblood Essays in Contemporary Culture series:

1) Girard biographer Cynthia Haven’s Everything Came to Me at Once: The Intellectual Vision of René Girard

2) First Things Editor-in-Chief Rusty Reno’s essay on Henry James and the Lie of the Beautiful Life

3) French Catholic Political Philosopher Pierre Manent’s remarkable reading of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, The Tragedy of the Republic

You can see the early success of our fundraiser or make a donation directly by visiting our official Classy Fundraiser Page.

I look forward to hearing from you, and express my deep gratitude for your friendship and time.

Sincerely,

Joshua

--
Joshua Hren, Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief
Wiseblood Books
wisebloodbooks@gmail.com

1 Comment

The Poetic Birth of the City

7/12/2017

2 Comments

By Joshua Hren

"Ulysses Returns Chryseis to her Father" by Claude Lorrain

In his Metamporphoses of the City (Fall 2013), Catholic political philosopher Pierre Manent, whose The Tragedy of the Republic is forthcoming through Wiseblood Books, posits Homer as the “father of the Greek city” in a careful and ingenious reading of the Iliad (that first poem of the Western world) and he speaks of the poetic birth of the city.
      But, we rightly ask, how could Homer grant us access into the birth of the Greek city? After all, when he gathered oral traditions around the year 725 B.C., he gave voice to a state of Greek life that is definitively different from and prior to Greek civic life. How then could he be considered the educator of Greece, “not in a general and so to speak decorous sense, but in the precise and rigorous sense of a master to whose teaching one should conform all the actions of one’s life” (30)? Manent suggests that we can answer this question by turning to Plato’s Republic, in which Socrates and his companions examine the question of the education of the just and beautiful city’s guardians. They first critique the “old” method, calling into question “the stories that mothers and nurses tell children and that, ‘are, as a whole, false.’” (31). These nurses tales are not individualized in each family, but are common across the Grecian households. Such stories are faulty first and foremost in that they said unacceptable things about the gods. (We might find it hard to believe that Homer and Hesiod, the poets whom Socrates and company name, are the actual authors of Greek religion, because this seems to those of us steeped in modern sociological prejudices to be quite beyond their power, certainly beyond the power of poetry.)
      In the human order of the Iliad, the gods play a major role. They are the “guarantors” and “authors” of the human world. Zeus, the “father of all things,” holds an irresistible power. And yet, Manent notes, “the human world penetrates the divine world, human passions stir the goddesses and gods, which prompts the Socratic demand to correct the ‘models of theology’ and incites us to regard the divine world rather as an extension, an amplification . . . of the human world . . . there is in the Homeric text much material to justify a ‘religious’ reading as well as a ‘humanist’ reading” (32).
      As is true in a certain sense of our own time, in the Greek world humans and gods (our gods being the pantheon forces associated with science, technology, entertainment, etc.), often resembled one another to the point of being indistinguishable. The clear difference between the two is drawn along the lines of mortality. “Homer did not discover that humans are mortal, but the Iliad is throughout, so to speak, a confrontation with mortality as there was never before and will hardly be after. The proof is that as ‘heroic’ and ‘aristocratic’ as the world of the Iliad is, death or the threat of death, equalizes all mortals, including the greatest of all, the son of an immortal, Achilles, who confronted the alternative of a long happy life without glory or an early, but glorious death” (34). The Trojan War that drives the epic narrative is “the condition and the consequence of the self-discovery of ‘mortals.’ That is why,” writes Manent, “while it speaks of nothing but war, nonetheless [it] says everything about human life, or at least considers it in its entirety.” (43).
      The gathering of Achaeans around the outskirts of Ilion does not constitute a city per se, but “one can recognize in it a heroic or aristocratic republic, this republic of quarrelsome persuasion that is the invention of Greece and whose virtues democracy will spread and develop. In short, the camp of the Achaeans, the city ‘in speech’ whose founder is Homer, was the common mother of the real Greek cities” (42). What are some of these virtues? We cannot possibly render them justice here, and so I will point to just a few.
      First, in case it has been some time since you’ve read or heard read the Iliad, I’ll read a bit and then summarize the opening conflict.
      Agamemnon, king of the Achaeans, has offended the priest of Apollo by refusing to surrender the priest’s daughter, Chryseis, even as she had come part and parcel with an immense ransom. In reply, the god Apollo sends a plague on the Achaean camp. The epidemic eats away at them for nine days. On the tenth day Achilles rallies the men and summons the greatest prophet-diviner, Calchas, who explains to the Achaeans that the cause of the conflict is King Agamemnon—his unruly, possessive action. In essence, then, the conflict bears on “the share that belongs to each man, to which each man has a right” (56). Agamemnon agrees to surrender Chryseis, but only because he has decided to take Achilles’ captive Briseis as his own. Filled with rage, Achilles declares that he and his men will no longer fight for Agamemnon. Zeus sends Agamemnon a dream urging him to attack Ilium. Before he heeds the dream, Agamemnon summons the Achaean armies, and, to test them, tells them (by inviting them to flee) to avoid fighting “his war.” He expects the men to push back against his seemingly cowardly insistence. “Thus, by advocating black, he will make them crave white. [Although Agamemnon is “king,] this is not our idea of an absolute ruler. The Achaeans need to be persuaded” (59). Unfortunately, “his typical trick has failed lamentably. He is at the end of his power. The only recourse resides in the prudence, or wisdom, of Odysseus. Only Odysseus is capable of confronting the exceptional situation, or the state of emergency [in which Agamemnon’s supposed sovereignty fails to win men over]. In this sense Odysseus, and not Agamemnon, is the true sovereign” (60). Speaking in turn to the few (the nobles) and the many (the general crowd of soldiers), Odysseus uses various means of persuasion to win the men back into battle, and he succeeds.

The amphitheatre in Ephesus

The Iliad, then, though it describes a world before the city, before democracy and the virtues that drive it, manifests in Odysseus one of the greatest democratic virtues: persuasion, which is given at random, is not relegated to a particular class or institutional authority, and thus “ . . . it is no coincidence that Odysseus’ other name is Nobody” (61). Yet, even as Odysseus succeeds in persuading nearly everyone, Thersites continues to mock and spew his spleen at Agamemnon. Odysseus rebukes him harshly and cruelly strikes him with his scepter. In Pierre Manent’s reading, Thersites stands as incarnation of the disrespectful person who criticizes power, who speaks truths better left unspoken. “He thus has some important things in common with Odysseus, first of all a freedom of outlook that stems from independence of mind with respect to social ties . . . One could say that Thersites is the spirit of comedy . . . Thus, as we see the Iliad, that with Achilles and Agamemnon contains the source and model of all later tragedy, and with Odysseus the prototype of the wise man and we might say the first version of Socrates, with Thersites also contains the living seeds of comedy. Homer was indeed in every sense the educator of Greece.”
      We need to—more than anywhere else—expand our conception of beauty beyond the mere aesthetic. As Manent writes in “The Original Experience of the City,” “Whereas the Greeks situated beauty in things themselves, we situate it in the eye of the beholder, or of the artist, and thus beauty for us is divorced from any explicit idea of greatness: since beauty is in our eyes, the smallest things—for example, three plums in a fruit bowl—can be the most beautiful. But if we detach ourselves even a little from the complacency or laziness of the spectator, from the desire that everything be smaller than our view, we will find meaning in the series of notions that are joined in Aristotle’s definition [of beauty]: self-sufficiency, perfection, happiness, and beauty . . . what is more noble, or beautiful, than the city” (98)?
      What we need, then, according to the third fundamental approach to a Catholic cultural renaissance, is a new Iliad, a new story that will manifest “what the many do together,” for what the many do together “rarely lacks a certain nobility, or beauty” (98).
      We will call beautiful that which comprises within itself “what the many do together” and self-sufficiency, potentiality and perfection, suffering and happiness—all of which are in a certain sense beautiful in and of themselves, but in another sense prepare the natural order for the supernatural. At first glance such a proposal may seem excessively ambitious or even quixotic. And yet, after giving the matter careful thought for many years, and with the small but significant apocalypse that will mark the ending whimper of the (post) modern world years hence (ten years or three hundred I don’t know)—I do not see how we can regard the composition of such an epic, a poem, a story, anything other than necessary.
      What will be the new city’s virtues, it’s predominant attributes and characteristics? How do we create a city in speech that is both Catholic and catholic, that educates to the same degree that it remains faithful to the dictates of art, that embodies virtues without falling into the unbelievable landfill of pious trash? Will the poem foster a common world with the citizenship Aristotle set forth in The Politics, in which characters have no political rights but rather political duties? What will these duties, these values, be? Truth? Irony? Justice? Self-interest? Humility? Shrewdness? Courage? A persuasive tongue? Will the new poem, as the Iliad, have a backdrop of war, thereby bringing mortality to the fore and dramatizing virtues (and failures to embody virtues) at their most heroic?

While we await the one or the ones who will compose the epic story, I want to point to one living author who is at the very least theoretically capable of composing such a poem. His name is Jeremiah Webster. I do not say that he can compose this poem on command, or that his mind and style are fully matured to the point that he could write the enduring epic that will last however many years or centuries as is necessary for the new city to emerge. I do, however, know that he has looked into the past long enough and in a prophetic sense looked into the future long enough to be able to write it. For now, I give you part of his poem “Ilium,” excerpted from his recently published debut poetry collection, After So Many Fires. It is a sort of prelude to the new Iliad, written from amidst one of the many fragmented forms of contemporary human life, a form so fragmented we can hardly call it a city:

Ilium

But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.
—Daniel 12:4

“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?”
thus asks the last man, and he blinks.
—Nietzsche

Far enough back
all was born of fire.
See how ordinary
the Pangaea becomes
when home is used
to describe it?
We begin with the silent
prayer
of stromatolites
as coastlines
shimmer
like strings.
I have no words to sink
below a sea with no fire,
but perhaps you can begin
naming these familiar hills.

* * * *

Mortar was left to dry on the trowel
the day we threw down shovel, pick,
left wheelbarrows to bake in the mud,
saw the moon in broad daylight
appear from behind the mountain
before being flung to the sea.
As boys throw stones from a sling,
so the moon flew from its circuit to boil
in the space of the sea.
Why downcast my soul?
Why marvel at the hour of Earth's unraveling?
Even the experts forecasted as much: the terminal
path of empyrean forms.

God is the first
mover, the second
to return, and the third
authority among Moderns.
There is only fear
when the earth gives
way and the mountains fall
on our freeways and interstates.
He begged for the rough rind
before juice could dry
from her mouth and chin.
She asked for a cherry pit
to suck on and survey the landscape.
The shore gave
way under waves
as a split sun
lit plankton and spare parts
from deserted ships.
They gathered antiques,
dug beneath the remains
of a once proud no longer nation.
As cutworms, imperceptible
from the air, feed off the underbelly
of a leaf, so this Adam, this Eve, subsisted
on ruins.

Thesis

Behold, the drunk whispers
as he wanders the streets.
City of Dis, I love you.
I live among your citizens
and praise each one as they pass,
faces flush after meals
on the waterfront.
People stare at passing human
traffic mute to themselves and
others. People talk and wonder
why no one listens.

See the world in your halls,
the vast diversity
of loneliness,
the moment on the metro
when all was silent save
for the clanking of metal against warm bodies,
strangers all texting below the radiant light,
passing all stops wordless to slouch (like shepherds)
over the private miracle:
the incarnate screen.

Gaze with me now,
coliseum, pyramid, gaunt cathedral,
climb my stairs beg skyscrapers, the radio towers reaching in desperation.
Nature lies prostrate before your electric defiance.
Construction sites, hoarse workers, steel, wood, brick, bellow the NEW
with brittle voices.

Praise the promise.
Drink to towers.
Receive this wine.

Antithesis

We’ll have plenty to eat,
Mother? the child asks.
With reverence, she rests
a hand on the generator
for when the lights go out.

One pen for the meat birds.
One pen for the cow.
One pen for heirloom seed.
One pen for the sow.

Water is drawn from wells,
purified through activated carbon filters.
Fiber optic lines run for miles,
the monthly funds funneled in
from urban banks.

Out on the hills, toiling
with able hands, a father builds
his monument.
With those he loves indoors,
he works until palms blister.
His assurance: the plateau
of a world defined by
away from,
further out,
better than,
not that.

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