Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
~ W.B Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’
One... more
Under the cruel glow of inquiry, I want to tell her that the party is over.
Hurry, tomorrow’s ashen face is at your door.
Hold out your hands, two tiny suns,
you’re more golden than they ever told you.
You’re from the cornfields, I tease, but not really. Your parents, professors at U of Illinois, both versed in the theories of music,... more
I grew up in grass but here / everything is bladeless, // hair thinned past feathers, / sheets slick enough to grease a boar.
Most nights we stayed behind, Tweety Bird / pajama shirts stretched over our knees, waist-length hair soaking / our backs as we sat on the floor and thumbed glossy 10mm prints.
It’s winter and again
my knees are beginning...
my parents taught me to say ‘surrender’
in a dozen foreign languages.
Subtraction, division,
rabbit bones, rabbit lives
sometimes i wake up in empty fields, waiting for the aliens to take me. they haven’t yet, but any day now, i’m sure.
I am David Attenborough. / I fear no mountain. / I fear no crane. / I fear no plastic bag.
And somehow I’m supposed to get dressed in the morning / when most days arrive like a gold chain tangled in black chest hair.
You will etch your name in the most lunar dust. This world / may be large enough for none of us, saddest darling.
It’s simple, really. / You, like the other yous / are gone, returned to the God of metals.
After being hospitalized in 1968 / for an aortic aneurysm, Rothko’s doctor / prescribed that he only paint and draw / on mediums less than three feet tall.
And what is essential for me to believe is that / the plants themselves were changed by Joan, / that bathing with her in the light and fragrance
spirits in the trees / hush love hush love / go’on fly home
It’s bronzy August and I need this to be all over. / Most of my poems are shaped like crows, / so what’s eating you?
A man spills a red solo cup down my shirt like hands. Hands bury in my skin. The speakers bury in my skin. I have never felt farther from the sky, or from my own spit.
"I didn't want to ever be outside of this moment. I knew at some point I would look at the picture I'd just taken and feel an overwhelming sense of loss. I thought as long as we could manage to stay inside this particular hotel room, to avoid our phones and every person with whom we'd ever come into contact, we would continue to feel whole. We were revolutionaries, goddamnit. These were our accumulation of beautiful moments. Before the world fractured us. I don't expect you to understand how I became Brad Pitt in that moment, how we all just flew along down the highway. Bandits. Ex-patriots. In love with this countryside, if not this country. Paper Moon. The Last Picture Show. All of this shot in black and white. Only the final scene in color."
FOUR NEW ESSAYS BY CHLOE CALDWELL! Plus the original essays that made you fall in love with Chloe!
Jason Phoebe Rusch is a queer writer from the Chicago suburbs. His full-length debut Dualities explores gender and patriarchy from the perspective of a man who was socialized and is currently still read as a woman. He is interested in complication and nuance and messy human failing, his own and that of others.
