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from "Repeat Until Time"
Hannah Sullivan

"When things are patternless,
their fascination's stronger."
When things are patternless, their fascination's stronger.
Failed form is hectic with loveliness, and compels us longer.

The horse chestnut gets on tediously with its leaves,
Provides spiked toys, diets middle-aged in winter,
Gets low-carb skeletal, squash lean, only to
Have another go with the old Cool Whip come spring.

The oak tree is absurd as new parents amazed
That a baby's nails need cutting, dead keratin: so slick
So dull, that eternal kernel rigmarole,
The bee-sucked flower, the pig-shat nut,
From which, what junky miracle, new oak trees grow?

The pollarded tree is subtler, its season a fungal autumn.
The branches that were husbanded will never grow clean.
But stunted they stay, an old woman's cobbled knees,
Thick legs beneath a butterball skirt, a green flare,
Her skirts lifted high as she dances to wedding music.

Rolled-up sleeves around each cut-back head
End in slender new sprouts,
Crooked forearms shot from the bark.

You think of Alabama at noon,
A quiet clapboard church,
White shirts rolled up, dust motes
Antsy on the windows, in the heat,
An uncertain hosanna.

It is hard to say if there is progress in history.
from the book THE FSG POETRY ANTHOLOGY / Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Color image of the cover of Gabrielle Bates' collection, Judas Goat
"The Price of Survival in Judas Goat"

"One wonders if these are the only options in our era: are we the Judas goat, the sheep, or both? The sacrificed or the betrayer? And does oblivion, willful or otherwise, absolve us of our actions? Do these roles—forced upon us literally or figuratively—make us unable to trust in our instincts?" 

via THE CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Color image of the cover of the journal Aufgabe, 10
What Sparks Poetry:
Andrew Zawacki on Sébastien Smirou's "The Lion"


"The orthodox part of the evening once completed, we turned to our current project—very much under construction—namely, the English translation of Sébastien’s sophomore book, a bestiary titled Beau voir....The plan was Sébastien’s, inspired tangentially by the so-called 'torture test' that Olivier Cadiot and Pierre Alferi had devised, which involved translating Robert Duncan’s falconer-mother back and forth between English and French, so the original would bloom anew through its successive degradations."
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