by Joseph Stevens McClure (’19)

One to Another

the fawn retreats and, in–folding, I
reign, nostalgic body prominent
with each step on tight, tactile shoots,
feet rendered pointillistic, mind stalled in muddy
grace I would do my best to worry dry
with thumbs to forefingers for the duration
of an atonic “plumb the depths” =/= willed slippage

————= what will be as balm for the vacancies now harsh
————throughout the soil and streets = what nocturnal now
————surrenders itself to my tour = interiors, darkly mobile,
————stalking about with a cultivator’s cold, curved
————patience = disguised = my
————recombinant yawn, jawed lower and lower
————and intractable, the act
————of uprooting = the pounce
————from habitat to handled = the teeth
————on the neck = reeling in (the wreck) a resolution =

this, my illness, animal—all of this
my place, yet nowhere do I locate,
and seldom do I open but to eliminate
and feed. I will plump the debts, I will
attest to myself as the moth
attests to light, a dream.

 

Intercession (Scored)

switch there likens
—————its breath to me
click light you could
—————breathe in cover
switch scuttle in
—————ground here I
step through the splitting
—————leaf curved turning
material to home
—————brick then flood supports
switching surrounds but you
—————unsupported so
switched I build your
—————list I miss my
tremble and sweep
—————hard the pounded
string vein brims
—————alive string singed
to singing light
—————instrument in you
drives me away click
—————drive home click
switch happens right
—————there the rain hits
here slips collects on
—————click branches can
hear you drop you
—————home and here my
handles turn to
—————rust my skin
threaded with bone at
—————home in dark the candle
thrusts light——there is
——light——there is

 

Lungs and Their Compensatory Weather

Seconds rear in grit-glass contact with dirt fumes, mute
sinews stretched among unbordered volumes rising,
lashed to the cracked hint of broken
bottles buried. Autumn dirtbreath huddles
around these spectacles of odd, brute
fraction, wolves and their cubs, shard edges at ease
with rotting widowmakers already
fallen, matted with poultices of molding

leaves. Gave notice to the bloodied
hand. The season passes, seconds
ever replace themselves, lungs enjoin
the frost, which ebbs, the ground
is unthrottled and thaws, and cracked light compels
ponderous inhalations to clear each moment
of its block. The breath imperative. The seconds
heave with lungs that muscle
and elevate the soil life’s mycorrhizal elision

of vibratory cause and effect; a tremor
infects perception and births
fields of bold virus from dirty
exhalations. Breathe
as the demand, breath
as the phenomenon

brings bald pulmonary retches
to burden temperature with degrees, and hackles
rise. Chests stutter and pump in asynchronous
mood, eyes brood with tidal attention
through which the elder mind crests
and is regal, regresses and is patched whole
with sunlight splayed fat and low

through the trees. Mold fades in lost beams
while seconds careen, play host to the dance
of lungs straining to sate themselves
in origami organics that never tire, that shred
the clockwork mechanics of each instant
with mitochondrial burns
and entropic frosts, rifting, settling
into planar hours of shadowed
hills amid a hostile, rising

haze—I hear the summer
shine’s crazed whine through the looming dark
demanding ventilation, which cannot be,
and wet contusions begin to bless a sky
stretched to snapping as raindrop
annotations fall below to save and forsake
each madly curling worm, each tested
lung, each second’s bracketed, maimed twist
a red tone banishing breath, rebellion

in the roiling chests, we reel
against the seconds, the towering
mounds of dirt, old grit against
which the stitched skin tears,
smiling open—hushed,
bright craters.

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Joseph Stevens McClure (’19)

“One to Another” began as an exercise in linking a few lines from Ben Lerner with some from Ilya Kaminsky. Those lines left the poem later, and the idea of reckoning with a gap of some kind remains at its core; here it is the gap, real or perceived, between natural and unnatural bodies. The shadow of the hunt, of attempting to hide, also emerged from this reckoning.

“Intercession (Scored)” works in and out of control of a pulsed, arrhythmic beat. As with the previous piece, this one deals with the felt sense of a lack or void, but in a more interpersonal context.

“Lungs and Their Compensatory Weather” began during the pandemic, and though it didn’t initially seem to have much to do with it, the focus shifted over the course of its construction to accommodate the accumulation of the pandemic’s attendant stresses. The poem addresses how the perceived passage of time became transformed and sometimes abruptly accentuated during this period, while emphasizing the nonhuman, particularly the tempo and magnitude of its changes in state.