it's poor swollen America

"The radio clicks on—it's poor swollen America, / Up already and busy selling the exhausting obligation / Of happiness while intermittently debating whether or not / A man who kills fifty people in five minutes / With an automatic weapon he has bought for the purpose / Is mentally ill. Or a terrorist. Of if terrorists / Are mentally ill."

~~ from "Dancing" included in Summer Snow by Robert Hass

The Kafka Virus

"The madness of each ordinary day versus / the language of someone raised by history / versus someone raised by a virgin, / I'm mostly interested in the devil's story, // because I know there's some devil in me."

~~ from "The Kafka Virus Verses: Thursday" in So to Speak by Terrance Hayes

fast friends

 

Conor and Mai's Loser I and Loser II with newbie Deadbeat Poets Society's Volume I: Maximiliano Guzmán. L.U.S.K.'s novelist-in-residence has placed short pieces in each of these.

metaphor

"Who does not love metaphor? Its quickness / That gives us the world to taste with our common senses. / I'll tell you what terrifies me: it is the idea that 'this is like that / Is like this is like that' could be all of the story, endlessly / Repeated, the poor human imagination having evolved into this / Brilliant swiftness of perception and then been stuck there, / Like a hamster in a cage, groping in the endless turnstiles / Of resemblance. We are to celebrate this?"

~~ from "An Argument About Poetics Imagined At Squaw Valley After a Night Walk Under the Mountain" included in Summer Snow by Robert Hass

cancer at fifty

"The clapping sound is the new crew boss / keeping time. Jane Kenyon, cancer at forty-seven. / Larry Levis, heart at forty-nine. Ray Carver / who had met Tess and beat alcohol which / was going to kill him, cancer at fifty."

~~ from "Harvest: Those Who Die Early in the Middle Years" included in Summer Snow by Robert Hass

Loser II

Mai Bell and Conor Hultman's Loser II includes Alex Kudera, Oliver Land, Nora Rawn, and many more.