TRAVIS MACDONALD
What it is Might Makes
by Seth Landman*
The sound of the doves’ animal Spanish
swings to and from a far off sign,
speaking its horseback magic
like there’s lightning concentrate
inside the disruptive rectangular dark
they grow. Every note holds on
some learning there—
a central rest, a command
and a location in it. Lest
I grow corn where my mind was,
with every agile pump she says:
now’s just awhile longer.
Material reality holds a happier
bug in that, a rustle and grapple
that says watch and remember.
I…I want to be able but also
to make out in
and about your
movements, Massachusetts.
That’s the feeling I keep
getting from this
good Western grass.
Will I ever be a pretty gentle-
man on the outside?
* from Sign You Were Mistaken, “Longer Doves”
Glass of Glass
by Dorothea Lasky*
I was not a dead blue body and you,
you were not a soft wilderness I was wild
in, a ringing ring-
ing red thing encased in dead. A body burned
soft in you. The dead
are not nerve, not rubber
encased in life. That is me. I am
not a dead thing. You are
encased in me, ringing
true like the glass thing. The real heart
you left alive in a net found true
love but not you. If you are so glad to go
out into the world cave, so glad to leave,
I would. But I am not wild
and brave enough
beyond that place.
* from Black Life, “You Are Not Dead”
Ear Opposite a Line of Thought
by Laynie Browne*
And you thought
mining a sign
for disbelief to plead
with will
return it to quotidian
fault and favor
its fictitious gold
fence
Thought once sought was spelling
Not a wish Not for practice Nor for ps(alm)
But earth and pine as you
step in yourself One
pen leaped opposite
the impossible gaped
line of thought lifting
this sullen dismembered scepter
under chasms where you think.
Travis Macdonald was recently named a 2014 Pew Fellow in the Arts. He is the author of two full-length books – The O Mission Repo [vol.1] (Fact-Simile Editions) and N7ostradamus (BlazeVox Books) – as well as several chapbooks, including: Basho’s Phonebook (E-ratio), BAR/koans (Erg Arts), Sight & Sigh (Beard of Bees), Time (Stoked Press) and Hoop Cores (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press).