The Brooklyn Rail

DEC 21-JAN 22

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DEC 21-JAN 22 Issue
Poetry

five


Source Code



    1

In that cave, each reverberation
created a semblance
in which the echoes
began to hear themselves
speak.


    2

Sometimes
the rumble of a nearby lawn mower
would make her sex
give a ping.


    3

Rapid eye movement.
The menace
behind sudden motion;
for a person
the meaning.









Communal



You stop to catch your breath,
dizzy, on the crowded trail,
so tired you
let the Lord in, oops!
in the form of
a fern-like conifer
undulating slowly,
each limb
drawing its own
lazy circle
in the air
from below.
Don’t worry.
He/She/They
won’t stay.
But remember your breath’s
not your own.









Knots



“Force-posture in place.”

That’s not funny!


Small dogs yip
after an ice-cream truck
circling slowly
in the asphalt melting heat.


Sasha says,
“Let’s just pretend
to be Sasha and Renee.”


No one is someone
in a dream, yet

dreams are full
of urgency.



I say,
a paradox
is like a knot;

a knot is like
a roundelay.









Picture This



Particles, whether long or short-lived,
arise from “a permanent
traveling disturbance
in a quantum field.”


But we all know that
when a disturbance
is permanent,
it no longer disturbs.


Picture a tent city.


     *


One way to think about it
is as a kind of tension
rippling through space.


We know how tension
distributes itself
in a body, now
behind the eyelids,
now in the shoulders,


how it can be moved
but not removed


so that, when we suck
on our knuckles,
our neck muscles
can relax


briefly.


     *


Why so tense,
we might wonder.


Did God yell “Hey!”
just once


as if testing
the acoustics?









In Passing



Perfumes, teas, and wines
are ranked
on their complexity.


People appreciate
a cryptic smile
in a painting.


Midway
between knowing best
and unraveling,
you look incredulous.


     *


Now the small cloud
with the head


of a hippopotamus
has aplomb,


sitting just beneath
its shapeless gray


mother.

Contributor

Rae Armantrout

Rae Armantrout is the author of fifteen books of poems, including Conjure, a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker award, (Wesleyan, 2020), Wobble (2018), a finalist for the National Book Award, and Versed (2009) which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2010. A new book, Finalists, is coming out from Wesleyan in March of 2022.

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The Brooklyn Rail

DEC 21-JAN 22

All Issues