Strange to think of machines that way I know the cold Grip of confidence or how A forgetting must Also be erotic How I have Always reached for a body Made to last The fall I am told & I am still telling this As cars part Route 4 into Soft focus A point Of Google Earth I’ve already reproduced From habit—I’m here Again—A stretch Of skin folding Inward like prayers Into a waiting palm No one is expecting Me for days or else I’ve forgotten who I am I can still See myself there Dangling like oranges In grove I am the first Person to make Eye contact All night Rain Sliding across my cheek To cut my copy Like a secret River A choice To remember or erase Some people Watch me & want to Fall in love a second Time I want To say something Always survives this Being what we Call a witness 7:37PM Sunday, December 23 When I begin the story the question of power seems inevitable I don’t know how to open that box can’t seem to turn the key without breaking it apart I want to keep driving in the same way I want to tell you the truth & still be able to look at you straight on At night the felled trees the telephone wires a field of dead aster that goes on for miles Which is to say: I am a lit match & I’m trying to keep myself from turning up the heat You see, there are only two kinds of weather Yes, the storm sirens are pitched at a higher frequency & now the same dream You are standing there with the book in your hand saying over & over I thought I knew you 8:09PM Sunday, December 23 The storm, the book, the dream The key, the match, the box The heat The poem Is teaching me something To say I have Missed myself again Too Often wanting only Something to hold up The time it takes to hang A copy & let it dry In the dark How I can Know & even believe I can’t help But to move or to keep From moving I Read in absence Of the body as a ritual The Greeks would burn A wooden double Of the deceased Instead They called Me a colossus 11:29AM Tuesday, December 26 But there are other exhibits in that museum: the final room was the site of the real violence & the annex still belongs to a dead woodsman: trophy after motionless trophy You see, even trained falcons wear blinders during the hunt At the end of the corridor you’ll find the next dispatch This is when you forget about the locked box, the field, the snow. You realize as the unease blossoms beneath your skin you realize you will need the match 4:16PM Tuesday, December 26
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[Excerpt by Kristina Marie Darling & Chris Campanioni via post on Gulf Coast Magazine] When I think of collaborative poetics I often think about the poetics of Relation, and thinking about what it means to be directly in contact with everything possible, an always-open structure in which, as Glissant said, “the creator of a text is effaced, or rather, is done away with, to be revealed in the texture of his creation.” When a solid melts, it reveals something always underneath, something at the very bottom, something inside—something new and something that was always already there. What I want is the intimacy of anonymous encounters within the text itself, and yet to be effaced and revealed, even and especially by my own authorial departure. And it would take the form of a repetition or a reversal; a re: verse in which we correspond lyrically; a re: verse in which our correspondence becomes the poem. Of course, an integral part of any correspondence is the space between things, those slender apertures lit up with waiting. It is in these liminal spaces that possibility accumulates. We write toward this space, in response to its silences.
Because we are neither here nor there, the rules of syntax and grammar, and their implicit logic, no longer hold. More specifically, liminal spaces offer the possibility of new causal relationships. Which is to say, after this no longer means because of this. Since we are in no man’s land, working at the periphery of the governing bodies associated language, it becomes difficult if not impossible to enforce any normative idea about how language, and narrative, for that matter, should behave. Nota bene: the meaning of the word aperture is twofold: 1.) a hole or gap. 2.) a space through which light passes in an optical or photographic instrument, particularly the variable opening by which light enters a camera. A collaboration functions in much the same way, capturing radiance as it passes from one person’s fingertip to the next.
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ABOUT THE POETS:
Chris Campanioni is a first-generation American, the child of immigrants from Cuba and Poland, and the author of the Internet is for real
(C&R Press) and Drift (King Shot Press). His “Billboards” poem was awarded an Academy of American Poets College Prize in 2013, his novel Going
Down was selected as Best First Book at the 2014 International Latino Book Awards, and his hybrid piece “This body’s long (& I’m still loading)” was
adapted as an official selection of the Canadian International Film Festival in 2017. He is currently a Provost Fellow and MAGNET Mentor at The
Graduate Center/CUNY, where he is conducting his doctoral studies in English and redrafting narratives of exile. He edits PANK, At Large
Magazine, and Tupelo Quarterly, and teaches Latino literature and creative writing at Pace University and Baruch College.
Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty-one books, including LOOK TO YOUR LEFT: A FEMINIST POETICS OF SPECTACLE (Akron Poetry
Series, 2021) and DARK HORSE: Poems (C&R Press, 2018), which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Her work has been recognized with
awards from Yaddo, the American Academy in Rome, the Academy of American Poets, and the Whiting Foundation. She currently divides her time
between the United States and Europe.