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…
That was the day Corydon became Corydon.
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”.
nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities. nonsite.org is affiliated with Emory College of Arts and Sciences.
