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Poetry

Travis Macdonald

By September 26th, 2020No Comments

The Someone is the I, I Told Them

by Joseph Cooper*
The little past I know lingers in

artless glass
bottles – lost in rows

 

and thought –

now breaks

in a way

to remember you by.

 

Frantically, like some dreams do. Say

 

how this body is an effigy scarcely burning

its bed sheets in another

altogether mirrored silence: I think

 

his mouth is a threshold of shelves

that looks, observes and engages me a while

searching for that magic of mimicry. Like

 

when I consider the junkyard, the postcard tornado
and its mean, loving activism

 

I can go on believing in a place, in the inter-

position of pills rattling, hitting

 

separately in this twisted abyss.

The name is a form of city

 

no

longer

 

building on the act of ground

yet not yet

certain like a line is—

 

writing on you to reconstitute

a cupboard of terrible loves

and the dark miracles ending

in audience.

 

*from Arias Let Into, “while searching frantically for pills in the mirrored cupboard rattling rows of bottles on its little glass shelves”

 

 

 

 

Travis-Macdonald-Dream-Pop-Press

Travis Macdonald is the author of two full-length books of procedural poetry – The O Mission Repo[vol.1] (an erasure of The 9/11 Commission Report) and N7ostradamus (an Oulipian treatment of Nostradamus’ quatrains) – as well as several chapbooks. In his spare time, he co-edits Fact-Simile Editions with his wife JenMarie. In 2014, Travis was the recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. He is happy to be here with you.