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We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
We are distinguished once our punch line is underwritten.
It’s the sound of a river churning, assertive in its nothingness.
Water threads everywhere, making the world wetter, making the debris float, an unchosen act expanding.
Life here is phantasmal. Globed, then photographed, blurred on the edge of what?
At first, we said like night and day, the poles are in the pipeline.
The survey began an unfiltered instrument, compressed like a pearl, sunk in a moment’s precise formation.
Explain how we amass a gabled domain, how we annotate this dynamo axing through the sylvan shade.
In a veneer of playing roles, I’m storied and customized, a shimmering monument blowing things into revolt.
To say it softly, as in the morning quiet, I’m packing heat. That fuse box is humming beside a thornbush.
If there’s enough irrational exuberance to tie us both to the tracks, does our body become a swooning emissary, a lock of nightfall unsnarled?
Instantly on special terms with a tropical wind, we could make this mourning a payload, a meteor of easement.
Unfurling my flag cloaked with a centennial’s disquiet, I’m programming in deference to a stagecraft embalmed.
A plot strategy or error of judgment, we say our lives are swaddled by small recognitions.
Matthew Gagnon’s recent poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Colorado Review, and Denver Quarterly.
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