Author: Ben Voigt

Time Capsules From the author: How do you capture a life in objects? How do still time? As an exercise in answering these questions, I started drafting “Time Capsules” every morning. Within days, I had over 30, many of which will appear as a section in my forthcoming collection Crawling Across the Continuum. “Tax Return, 1958”… Continue reading Heidi Seaborn

Burn 1 Flap me a carpet at the carport like a goodDadaist as he bicycles out of Berne.I’ll be drinking grappa and sniffing verbena;It’ll be obscene, and the obscenity will turn into phlox.Like putting a wheel on a wall, the bed of Phlox will practice abstinence.The bees will go to the bank and get tankedOn… Continue reading Adam Strauss

Gravity My Favorite Power As music leads to trouble Which we are out of fresh Day old trouble badFor business and also These creaking joints Driving a red pick-up truck From the eightiesScanning the radio Only country will do I didn’t even knowOld-fashioned car windows Could pop out like this Fashioning a ventOut of movement,… Continue reading Anne Gerard

The Weather My husband’s granddad chronicled the hail: gumballs,golf balls. A storm has thinned the orchard, he wrote,and blown strange birds to Yankton. Dry spell, he wrote,cool spell. You can see how it was, brevity and magic always afoot. Here and there, a break in the weather:Horse foaled, he wrote. Plow broke. Soup at Gerald,… Continue reading Jane Zwart

I Don’t Believe You (Gameshow Metaphysics) The first game is there/not there.The sky knows we are creaturesof trajectory and gives us choices.The green door will take us through the speciesto the other side. The crimson door is takenaway. It is a distant country, like everyone else.They want you to go in now. You have thirtyseconds… Continue reading Mike Bagwell

Daedalus and the Overlook If a corridor in a labyrinth collapses, it makes a deadend. The howling synthsburrow into my headlike a surgeon—his tiny chisel,his titanium plates. The sinusis an air cavity, he tellsme. I plan to crushit. There are days I am dead,my dug up skull a clockin my mind, held by a Hamletor… Continue reading Rivka Clifton

In the Forest of a Thousand Trees We Cannot Find Two Leaves Alike I wake still lost in the woods of you,in the would we of you —we would, it seems. I knowyou don’t love secrets as I do but we are alone in the forest of usand always will be.The path we followedfolded up… Continue reading Amorak Huey

You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive When my Grandpa Tom diedin the coal mines, crushed between two untrammeled carts, did he thinkI’ll never again be touched by a woman?Did he feel, as a cart full of sooty coalshoved his cock into his stomach, I hopemy offspring fuck so hard that they peesideways? Did he groan and… Continue reading Jess Smith

Florist for Stephen I’ve been looking for my head. Turns out, I left itat your house in that village we lived in once. I must have,because of the cold winter night—I refused to freezemy head off.You grabbed me by my forearm and led me backto your home, where my head was kept warmwith food and… Continue reading Jack Saebyok Jung

Ikebana The clock covers its face with long, thin hands —Gjertrud Schnackenberg Tonight, I finally managed to askmy mother (delicately, I think)whether she has begun to arrangeher affairs. Supposedly, AARPis running an end-of-the-year saleon last wills and testaments.Cannot the dying still appreciatea coupon? I try distracting myselfwith others’ words only to findbitter significance. (“Beautyis generally… Continue reading Erick Verran