The End Is Always Sudden
Liz Countryman
Fumbling forward in an arrogant fog.

The sensation of tiredness—tingle smell of swallowed coffee in the nose

is tiny, like Captain Cook's ship picking the edge of Australia.

He and my nose are determined nits.

Something eternal's surely obscured—?

The mouth-covering submission of having a vagina

of looking at the sky and desiring another order,

or not desiring another order (to be delivered by Cook or by nose)

but understanding the ridiculous fear that animates the oppressor

so small in a big space.

The memory of my father at the drive-thru window of a McDonald's
at night on I-87 north, his face lit and strained serious, is easy

to describe, whereas someone else's foam earphones,

or a soft anxiety that wants you to lie in it,

or the mountains at night, in a kind of feminine community
and exclusion.

How tiny I wanted us to be

on our journey which was a centimeter of atlas.

How my commitment to disoriented wonderment obscured
the physical reality of what we passed—

alien antenna,

romance of high school names painted on a rock face.

It's over and I'm on the long end of its pendulum.

A great lie I had constructed and am still lamely buttressing.

How the farm at night was dark and cool showing us the real
meaning of a house.

How the Lord might have thrown us over the Pacific like acorns.

It is the motion I make when leaving you in your car seat, facing
backwards.

How your warm organs in my embrace withhold the undiscovered
place they constitute.
from the book GREEN ISLAND / Tupelo Press
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Lord Byron Museum to Open in Northern Italy

"A museum dedicated to the flamboyant British poet and satirist Lord Byron is due to open in the northern Italian city of Ravenna, housed in the same building where he pursued an intense affair with the wife of an aristocrat and completed some of his most famous works. Byron unabashedly moved in 1819 into Palazzo Guiccioli, owned by the husband of Countess Teresa Guiccioli, whom he met at a party in Venice. The sprawling residence in the heart of the city has been restored by the Cassa di Risparmio di Ravenna Foundation and from 29 November visitors will be able to wander through the rooms."

viaTHE GUARDIAN
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What Sparks Poetry:
Mary-Alice Daniel on Object Lessons

"Science is one language articulating the esoteric fabric of spacetime. Verse is another valence. Astrophysics and poetry pair prettily. Both concern themselves with the behavior and spectacle of celestial bodies; with the margins of massive matters alongside the infinitesimal; the inconceivable infinite. Dreamers in the two disciplines speculate alternate & extra dimensions. We enlist anomaly. We trouble in stasis. We peer into—across—the reality tunnel: the entangled expanse between what you see and I perceive."
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