Anything worse
can you imagine the stink
of floodwater children chasing each other
for a game through green squelching
pesticide grass
dragonflies not ever even once closing
their mineral eyes
history occurs at the cellular level
this or that wet gate
thrown open
a parade of kinked or otherwise kinked proteins
shuffling down through the centuries
such that your thrice great-grandmother
every peck
of sour barley & shame yet haunts your RNA I’m serious
I blame the hard Finnish winter of 1863
for over by the creaky swings
the skater boys huffing spice
the exclusion acts for the neighbor woman we never see
one night
hauled out beneath the whitest sheet
& this morning when into bed with us my six-year-old son
slides his small perfect body
I’m thinking twenty thirty forty years hence
the wet messages even now assembling
falling through arterioles & bones
I’m thinking last night of him not going to bed not going to bed
not not not
I ripped off his blankets blazed the lights nearly shattered
the damn window flinging it up in its frame
you want to stay up all night
fine all right are you
all right I ask this rain-dark morning
& in answer he snuggles up against me
his allotment of lying blood
just two skins from mine
from the journal THE SOUTHERN REVIEW
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June 10 - June 16, 2020

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Black-and-white image of the late Sean Bonney at a microphone
"The Bard of Capitalist Realism"

"Bonney’s poetry is as fully commensurate with the fevered, queasy, anxious, often tedious nature of the current global mood as that of any of his more lauded contemporaries. Bonney’s poetry is not of the graduate seminar but of the picket line, not for the poetry reading but for the punk show."

via POETRY FOUNDATION
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Cover of Mary Ruefle's book, The Most of It.
What Sparks Poetry:
Arda Collins on Mary Ruefle's “The Bench”


"[T]he argument about the bench, like many arguments, is about truth. The participants both believe their bench is the true bench. Despite the argument’s low stakes, it describes the larger philosophical positions of the speaker and the husband. The speaker describes her bench in terms of the eternal; the husband’s bench is mortal." 
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