*Image: “Dead Autumn Leaves In A Rain Gauge” by William C. Crawford, photo
Rebecca Durham
Featured Poet
Find the Foci
An unclasped lapse
an ascent slips into our axis, to wonder what if
the fourth breath was the fifth?
A sharp breach of shadow our arrow
red-tipped such fissures.
If:
skin = bark and
each edge is chert
drought fraught
llena
and
epithelia = pith
then
would cells instill
this ellipse?
Surrounding the Senses
after Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
As long as the rain
as long as the reverberation
isn’t verbal a very bare
sound goes down by the
river and washes its vowels off.
Is an offering.
Climb down the overall pattern
where vision snags on something
other than other.
Summon it.
The sum of assertions says something
blue or black or born whirling and entering is
a mirror that goes by many names
none of them
begin with a or end in zenith.
Echo
the myriad things, their own tones and textures.
The sensible world wants words, but the wind
within it isn’t uttering. The bulk of
jagged snags dissipates into uncivilized
oblivion.
Primordial awareness incarnate carves
colors from us. Sooner or later the
contours count, sooner or later
pivotal magic.

Imagine Being Present And Finding Yourself Gone
So present I become dissolute.
No more body
than a leaf is sky.
The only duality, a parting of sound. Ears make my I.
From one side, specificity of motion, a staccato of water finding rock
immovable. Over and over it pulses and crests. A loop of dips, iterations
of soaring and sinking.
To my left.
To my right
an indiscernible roaring, atoms swifting, a sensing. I hear it, am it, heart
cupped. How far seems the chaos of incisions, those injections of
destruction. Here only sings this rushing.
No desire, dreams, words, thoughts, but not without. Not a lacking, or emptying, or longing.
Filling like glacial till, ice pressed. Scoured out, smoothing.
With the rest of my entirety, I enter.
Echo matter.
Now words fall like budscales. What follows?
Body is inaudible, a wild compilation of spruce, cottonwood, argillite, soil, ants, horsetails,
kinglets, currants, dogwood, sedges, lichen, pollen, detritus. No semblance of expectation.
Inspiration and exhalation, itself already done with itself. Between depths nothing is parsed
or sorted into anything but suggestion. No proof of hues. Body spills, flows, fills.
Of earth, a fluidity.
Yet speak nothing, think nothing. Body edgeless, silent, still.
Atoms with overlapping edges, writhing, a haze of matter, whirring. writhing & edgeless.
overlapping & lapping & lapping with motion
recur & recur & recurring
returning to saturation
encircled &
encircling