Drawn from coroner’s inquests and newspaper reports from England between the 1770 and 1920 — very much in the spirit of Charles Reznikoff, nothing invented.
Injured bone. Blynken and Nod.
Visor your irises, handle with tongs.
We all think the Mandate of Heaven belongs
To him who gets-away-with.
Study death. Learn it by heart.
Following to the rules of spelling
dead words.
Spell it together
like commonwealth or toadflax.
Do not split it
among the dead.
…the black lead of his carpenter’s pencil has been pressed into the paper with tremendous force, far exceeding the demands of the form or the requirements of the shading in that precinct of the image…
this is the hour
of the small ear
& the sea’s all a case
of minds. the splotched
ginkgo leaves attest
nothing more than
dogshat sidewalks.
There is not not anything true here; there is not no thought
whose single attention might burn as the day burns, holding
in flame and in fury to longing, or stuck to the nub
of some one refusal, some stubborn remainder of thought.
Nonsite presents new poetry. Three prose poems by Michael Fried: “The Divergence,” “An Essay in Aesthetics,” and “Akhmatova Looks Up.”
Nonsite’s first offering in poetry. Two poems by Nicholas Liu: “Bridge to Nowhere” and “Sleepers Awake”.