Dan Beachy-Quick * Miranda Mellis * Brian Teare
When: Friday October 18, 7:30 pm FREE
Where: Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC), 1001 SE Division St., Portland
By Dan Beachy-Quick
DRONE
sand and what is
sound, the nacre-sound,
this heart’s acre, bound, unbound
o irritant speck
all this dust you call clouds
all this doubt you found
just by thinking I am
not quite complete
ly alone o prism o prison
I thought the whole thought
mind the dirt holy ground
By Miranda Mellis
TO SHADOW
On YouTube there is a video of a three-year-old afraid of her own shadow. She stands with the sun behind her in the glare of a playground. When she moves, her shadow moves, and she weeps with fear. Every time she notices her shadow, she cries. Every time she cries, the audience laughs. Haplessly framed, voided, simulated, and reproduced, she tries to escape. But she can find no refuge from her evil twin or from the unseen audience. Trees’ wayward shadows lace crookedly, weaving disorder through the system of the playground. A nearby building’s shadow makes a large swathe whose edges demarcate a seeming interiority, a provisional indoor quality: It is colder just inside the wall of that shadow than it is just outside. The shadow of a small bird making its way over to a swing set is a film, a moving slant rhyme. A mimic, the shadow moves as the sparrow moves. Though the outline of the shadow, taken by itself, would not necessarily convey that it is cast by a bird (it could be a scrap of paper, or a teacup, or a hand), its movements are birdlike. The shadow is anamorphic, seemingly alive even.
Excerpted from "Misapprehensions: A Mobile in Ten Parts" by Miranda Mellis
By Brian Teare
OCCUPY SONNET
an
English-to-English translation of Shakespeare’s fortieth sonnet
Why turn a lover’s
discourse into a discourse about debt? The sonnet begins with a complaint: if
I’ve already given you all my money, my love, then I’ve given you my all. But
sonnets and lovers depend on numbers. We tried to explain this to the credit card
companies, but we were charged a late fee plus interest. Both poet and lover
enumerate, count with their fingers: syllables, promises, both stressed and
unstressed. We tried to explain this to the banks, but we were convicted of
defiant trespassing and conspiracy. The success of writing a sonnet or of
loving rests on neither being too idle about counting, nor too attached to the
act of counting itself. We tried to explain this to the federal government, but
our calls couldn’t get through. Such idleness might indicate a lack of ardor or
insufficient intellectual engagement; over-investment in the numbers might
indicate a lack of trust or insufficient imagination. We tried to explain this
to the White House, but the woman on the 27 bus told us: “He thinks dick is
stronger than money, but we know
money is stronger than dick.” A good writer or lover knows the true value of what
they’re counting, but debt begins when the beloved says, “What you have given
me is not enough.” A few of us began to protest. “Poverty is something money
can’t buy,” Joanne says. The sonnet’s complaint continues: I’ve given you all I
had, and now you want more. What am I supposed to do? Some of us kept working
three jobs and making payments on time. This is an example of what the literary
critic calls “the masochism of the abjectness of love.” Some of us who later
joined the occupation were taking out student loans or were still unemployed or
had lost homes to foreclosure. Such theft can only be forgiven when debt is a
lover’s playful fiction, an accounting that amounts to nothing spent but wit.
Some of us were vets unable to get proper psychiatric care; some of us had lost
access to medical treatments our health depended on. When poverty is literal
and persistent, it’s an injury we learn to live with without forgiveness. The
sonnet goes on to argue something like: the problem with numbers is that when
we have plentitude, we tend to forget the experience of lack or find it
threatening. National networks send us images of violent confrontations; from
Oakland Miranda and Eirik send us images of peaceful actions; Brenda reminds us
“we are agents for something greater than ourselves.” The problem with the ones
obsessed with numbers above all else is that counting offers endless labor that
replaces all other activities. Counting confers an illusion of value when in
reality it is by itself all but worthless. On the train beneath Wall Street, a
sleek pinstriped financier falls asleep with his youthful cheek pressed against
my shoulder. It confers an illusion of total order when in reality the one who
counts has had to forget their knowledge of everything between us that can’t be
converted to currency. Under rush hour fluorescence I see beneath his jaw a
patch of stubble his morning razor missed; I see his grip on his leather
briefcase slowly slacken. The concluding couplet makes a concessionary gesture:
because of the contradiction alive in everything, I see it will be necessary to
love the ones who don’t yet know how gravely they have wounded us, if only
because soon their dream will stop, the doors will open and they will wake up
in our arms.
1001 SE Division St
