"Devotion: Rimbaud" - by Bruce Smith

To my brother: in his khaki habit like the one the missionaries wore
who were sent to the windy end of empire to serve and secure,
he turns in his cubicle, he rends a veil with his pencil,
he moves a decimal, he breaks and sets code like bone.
For the poor.

To my brother: in jail in his Wu Wear and absolutes—
everything’s a knife—there’s no such thing as silence
as John Cage said when there was irony and random
was a tunnel under the symphony of another century.
For the violated.

To Emma: that demon who was Linnaeus or Levi-Strauss
in another life, publishing the ideologies and taxonomies of smell—
fox, rot, scat, gall, goat, and once a rasher of bacon.
For the cherubim. For the kin.

To the debutant I was: a glistening fly in winter.
For the fevers of children.

To the man at 60: a turnip disinterred, a peasant in snow with bad shoes.
For the cult of the exaggerated girl.

To the rich: chattering dolphins in a sea of benzene.
For the afflicted.

Tonight, in the untowered downtown of Syracuse, the currency
hardens to the gray slugs the slot machine spits out and as the ghost
fish smell in the low haphazard heaven, I make this vow to look around. 
For the ones to my right and my left. 

"Breathing Space, July" - Tomas Transtromer

The one who's lying on his back under the tall trees
is also up there within them. He's flowing out into thousands of twigs,
swaying to and fro,
sitting in an ejector seat that lets go in slow motion.

The one who's standing down by the docks squints at the water.
The docks age faster than people.
They have silver-gray lumber and stones in their gut.
The glaring light pounds all the way in.

The one who's traveling all day in an open boat
over the glittering bays
will fall asleep at last inside a blue lamp
while the islands crawl like huge moths over the glass.

- Tomas Transtromer, trans. Patty Crane (2023)

From "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" by Walt Whitman

I

Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!
Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour high—I see you
also face fo face.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes,
how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that
cross, returning home, are more curious to me
than you suppose,

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence
are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you
might suppose.

2

The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all
hours of the day,
The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself
disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of
the scheme,
The similitudes of the past and those of the future,
The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and
hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage
over the river,
The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me
far away,
The others that are to follow me, the ties between
me and them,
The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of
others.

Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore
to shore,
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west,
and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross,
the sun half an hour high,
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years
hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide,
the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide…

- Walt Whitman

Cormac McCarthy, from "The Passenger"

“That house was the most beautiful house I ever saw. Every floor in it was solid walnut and some of them boards was close to three foot wide. All of it hand planed. All of it at the bottom of a lake. I dont know, Bobby. You have to believe that there is good in the world. I’m goin to say that you have to believe that the work of your hands will bring it into your life. You may be wrong, but if you dont believe that then you will not have a life.”

Alex Dimitrov - "The Why"

The Why

I want to be in rooms full of people I love.
The world goes white then green again
like the mind telling the body it is not alone.
The body saying something I can almost hear
above the sound of a dog barking
because he feels himself tied and tremendously alone.
Who would you believe?
I walk the great streets of New York City
where many great people have lived
and think how great it is to live and die on earth
even if it means having known nothing
of the why. Nothing of the why.

Michael Robins - "Sculptures of Virginia Woolf"

Sculptures of Virginia Woolf

They're sentences in waiting, diagrams drained. Tuesday raises her hand & asks directions to the bathroom. She misses cigarettes, lessons how kissing the boy she drags into the Sadie Hawkins dance keeps her homeliest gal in all them hills. Tuesdays fenced in, clad like tea cozies as though for a parade. A crossing guard & spinster, spent tissues saved & saying how I'm with stupid is a saying for life. Sundown thereafter kicking & kicking. Boys waving from the backseat of a car.

Haesong Kwon - "Thank God for Hard Feelings"

The life of a garment worker in midtown Manhattan.

She worked as seamstress in the sweatshops of New York City.

Whose mother is not the love of their life?

She pushed her lunch on co-workers

from Russia, Togo, Haiti, Dominican Republic.

They disliked the sugar fried anchovies.

They saw the nimbus on each fish

and politely or raucously declined. The cavernous

spaces of her mind. Having studied graphic design

at Duksung Women’s College, Dobong-gu, Seoul,

what else was she going to do but write a novel.

Staring at sea windows, she scrawled and chalked

in her head. Drong of eternal absence. An expert

on the social history of the Staten Island Ferry,

she confided in me the act of crying was a privilege.

What type of person leaves a near full can of

coconut water on the bleachers? You have to be

happy in order to weep, or sob. I can teach you,

she said to me. If you can hold a pencil, I can teach you

how to draw. But I’ve known people who have

no hands. Who have no fingers.