Poetry
The Script
I.
You thought this would be
a dance lesson,
things were easier then.
No marimbas, no clarinets;
only a longing for the fun
to begin.
Rain came down.
Nothing seems as remote
as the days you didn’t
have to think about it:
always out there,
gushing out. Control
was required to stop ideas
from overflowing.
You did your job well,
you killed them like an Easter
baby chicken.

II.
Rasputin was on the lookout.
Magdalene had multipurpose hair:
Kumernis had it in stocks
where and when she needed it,
on her beard especially. Anything
to keep the Barbarians away
will do. Chopped noses,
rotten chicken stuffed in corsets.
We were told that the demons
would come out in Maine.
They hate recollections and certainty.
Their favorite verb is to sabotage.
III.
Rasputin helps one to recognize inspiration; but, oh, what could
imagination be?
To retrieve, to plunder, to forge.
To be bored.
To rip kites so they may stay on the ground.
To forget jokes and misunderstand common sense.
To sit for hours without getting up.
To count words and people and only remember their numbers.
To listen closely to what loons could be trying to say.
To permutate dots so that lines are never identical to each other.
To return to known places and act always the same, thus the slight-
est change might become apparent.
To force things to happen.
To pretend there’s meaning when all that comes out is a “My dog
loves me and he’s no showboat.”
To think there’s nothing to say.
To leap from canopy to can openers to can open her.
You’ve begun, now use your props.
Contributor
Mónica de la TorreMónica de la Torre works with and between languages. Her latest book, The Happy End/All Welcome, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse, which also put out her translation of Defense of the Idol by Chilean modernist Omar Cáceres in 2018. Repetition Nineteen, her new book of poems, is forthcoming from Nightboat in 2020.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

The Rain Gardens Project
River Rail Puerto Rico | River Rail
The Institute for Socio-Ecological Research documents the collaborative work of rain gardens in Ponce.

Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births
By Ksenia NourilOCT 2021 | Art Books
Whether or not a birthing person, one will find a more comprehensive and empowered approach to sexuality, procreation, and rearing in this book than in any mass-market guide, medical textbook, or doctors office. The fact that this information must be conveyed through the guise of art and design points to our societys deep-seated discomfort withand lack of substantial support forbirth.
Things on Walls
By Darla MiganMAY 2020 | ArtSeen
In what now seems like prescient thinking borne out of a creative collaboration, the exhibition Things on Walls at Affective Carean operating medical office specializing in psycho-interventionist treatmentexplores sculpture in a variety of mediums, including ceramics, wood, cast paper, resin, metal, and video. Organized by New Discretions, a curatorial project by Benjamin Tischer of Invisible-Exports, the show includes 17 works that play in the overlaps of inner life understood as both designed physical space and psycho-sensory interiority.
Some Thoughts on a Constellation of Things Seen and Felt
By Adrienne EdwardsNOV 2020 | Critics Page
This summers persistent melee of images and videos circulating in news reports and on social media of the extrajudicial, gratuitously violent deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the collective uprisings they incited under the mantra Black Lives Matter drew me out of the intensity of that present moment and into a descent imbricated and wedded by the beholding of the inextricable combinatory assembly that is embodied Blackness, acts of barbarity, and a yearning for intimacy.