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It is such a powerful Sunday—the day for rest, for reading, for contemplation. Read with me.
Happy Sunday, y’all!
I am thrilled to share that I will be co-hosting an off-site event with Collin Spinney at Portland’s AWP 2019 on March 28th! Join us for unmissable readings by Poets Reading the News writers Megan Merchant, Devon Balwit, Matty Layne Glasgow, Rémy Dambron and Charissa Menefee! Also presenting are journals Rise Up Review and Writers Resist with an amazing range of readers, including a few you’ll recognize from PRTN—Tara Campbell, Cynthia Atkins, Robbie Gamble and Erica Goss. More details here.
This week we very much deliver the poetry. The Opportunity rover on Mars sent its last communique this week, sparking Abby E. Murray’s fierce investigation into finality in an era of ceaseless cultural reproduction. Yvonne writes an homage to the life of Rosa Parks and the history of her Detroit home - abandoned, reassembled in Berlin, and finally returned to auction in the United States. Joseph Pascutazz recreates with an exacting spirit the edifying rhetoric of Andy Warhol, whose presence has been gracing television screens and cultural conversations after his work was annexed by a fast food chain. And finally, Parker Jamieson interrogates Southern Baptist church rites, after over three hundred leaders and organizers were accused of sexual misconduct.
It is such a powerful Sunday—the day for rest, for reading, for contemplation. Read with me.
Yours in poetry,
Elle Aviv Newton
Editor
Recovery Commands
By Abby E. Murray
“My battery is low and it’s getting dark.”
– Final message received from the Opportunity rover on Mars
I expect nothing else
from my species:
when death spins closer
like a world of dust
we get busy writing code
for resurrection.
We communicate
with what is ours in dust:
Turn this way. Come back.
Take a picture of the sun.
We hold up a finger
and wait for more silence
as if we have consent to give.
Sometimes it seems
darkness has patience too—
we’re granted minute
after minute because
it might be the minute
a voice, a pulse returns
and the end will be
pleased to stuff itself
up some other pipe.
I’m not proud
but this is how I love,
as if it is my nature
to receive an answer.
I chose to love you
beyond our living
yet neither of us knows
how to accomplish this,
so we built a promise
out of what? metal?
and shot it into space.
When our time is up,
not even the universe
can erase the atoms
that made up my mind.
They’ll be exploding
somewhere, sweeping
the atmosphere in the form
of recovery commands:
Wake up. How are you?
Can you hear me?
2672 South Deacon Street, Detroit
By Yvonne
Rickety wood box of a house
Two stories with a pitched roof
White bottom, black top, peeling
Paint, straight out flat the shipping
Crate, set right up on hard bare ground.
(No disrespect) in strange Berlin.
Why? Some mover opened these doors.
Some shaker trod these floors,
Traced these stairs, leaned against these walls
(Never in despair?) from hours
Hunting a bit of work. Life trickles
On. With or without a name.
Montgomery, Hampton, Detroit—even fame
Traveled on, after fingerprints, bail, no job—strife
Unearned, hate mail, threats—after boycott there’s life.
Pulled/pushed, never untouched, she found herself,
Hubby by her side, at brother’s door.
This same door—not ramshackle then. Poor.
“Home is where they have to take you in.”
How many children underfoot? Fifteen!
A little peace with those who knew her when.
Recipes by heart. Griddle cakes, apple butter.
Chicken with dumplings, blueberry cobbler.
Piece work in the basement. Two years. Then gone.
Some say death comes in threes. Then a fourth.
Children birth themselves and leave the hearth.
Simple things. Despite a fabled kinswoman.
Did she ever own? Not even this
One precious home? Put under glass.
This refugee, of a sort. This haven.
#EATLIKEANDY
Joseph Pascutazz
Once I ate a hamburger
in a film.
Now I’m eating a hamburger
in an ad
for a fast food chain.
The smiling king prepared
a seat for me at
the table where
I would be eating
the hamburger.
Heinz ketchup is the blood
of America.
You can wear a wig like me, Andy,
and eat your own hamburger.
Eating is an art.
I am so happy,
though I am a ghost,
though they pay me
only in ghost burgers.
I would gladly pay you
Tuesday
for a hamburger today
said Wimpy.
The wig is white,
it makes you look like
you just saw a ghost.
We are all
cartoon ghosts famous
for however long
it takes
to eat a hamburger.
Hamburglar made an art of stealing them.
‘Until the cows come home’
is ‘a very long time.’
I never lost control
of my image. The wig,
the I’m-not-here stare.
I didn’t think
I would be so hungry
in the afterlife.
I thought I would live
forever.
I was right.
But somebody made me eat
the burger I already ate.
I said, “No thanks, I’m full,”
but the suits said,
“You look so skinny
Andy. Have another
hamburger.”
Like they were my
mother or something.
The Black and White and Defiled Communion
By Parker Jamieson
So who did I make my holy communion with?
Whose hand was it
that gave me the bread and the wine?
Whose smile was it
supposedly that graced my life
and gave me a new name?
How difficult can this baptism become
if the water is contaminated
with hands
that defile the holy compartments
that it seeks to bind
with the zeal of ancestry?
The steeples slink
into the bottomless nuance
of lust and boldly
into hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy, a failure
to stick to the first word,
to give up the first intent
of their original plan
and seek another.
What was the word of the priest I communed with?
In the velvet room
with the course fragility
of an acolyte’s robe,
it wrapped around me
like a file, shaving down
my potential and every other child’s potential.
The southern dream,
a welded sun on the beauty
of a smile in the heat,
this has diminished under oil;
the priest of my youth
has fallen into the whole smeared painting
crusted upon the brow.
This Protestant work
has savaged the finished prayers.
There is no registrar of illicit priests,
volunteers, clergy, bodies sharp as vipers,
no hand I trust to shake.
But
I have arrived in Canaan,
I have arrived in time
to see this righteous football game.
I have arrived to witness
the languages get mixed around
the highest temples
where children have been bloodied,
where I have been studied
by the filth in a magnifying-glass.
“The Judgment Seat of Christ
will be far less reticent
than a newspaper series
to uncover
what should never have been hidden.”
I have arrived to redeem
the rip
on my childhood seams.
I have come to learn about
the man I had a communion with.
Who was it that I made a holy communion with?
The belfry, the lantern, the spire,
each is corroded
with shame, the wrongful touch –
a young desire.