❤️

The Early Years

I don’t want to say

things were indescribably

bad exactly

but things were

indescribably bad exactly

I don’t want to say the tide

went out and left him

gasping—a landed fish precisely

but the tide did indeed go out

and left him gaping—a dropped ghost

to make matters worse

god gathered up all of god’s things

and paddled out on that tide

so he swore he would die

and to make matters worser still

he rocked back and forth

in a bubble rather boggy and sad

ate nothing but thistles therein

I don’t want to pretend

things were very much worse

than they were

but they very much were

Mark Waldron

.

No. 21

That two shells could be connected at their centers is a new thought I’ve never had. The way the canvas with its colors now turns into cubes. My life has been livid with itself for too long. The way out of my life is to fall out of the bottom of the old one. The way af Klint’s swans lost their faces right away. All this time, we were told to find yourself. The self was only a rumor. Maybe we were supposed to be with our dimensions. So that we could become different shapes within the same shape. Like mid-morning within morning. Yesterday, I heard the neighbors shouting, go wait at 29th street! Then later, just throw it away! I couldn’t hear anything else but, it was so good that you did that. Sometimes writing a poem feels like this. You put language together but the context is missing. Just the crisis remains. How you only hear something splash behind you. Sometimes living feels like this. You live your life, but the context is missing. You think it’s the context that you need. But when it arrives, there’s too much story and violence.

Victoria Chang