Never Mind the Bylines, Here's the Poetry: April 1, 2021

The difficulty of this matter
(after Galileo)
Kim Fahner

Let the telescope invert the image of the sun and its spots, then,
and trace it on paper that spreads itself across your busy desk.

Look at it head on, the sun, with eyes wide open,
and you will ruin your eyes over and over.

Don’t. Keep them for later, so you can look up—again—
and know that the sun will be your mistress until you go.

Trace those sunspots, how they travel for a month of days,
so that you leave behind a pencilled map for astronomers.

More like terrestrial clouds than stars, you tell Welser in a letter,
more like emotions that move through a body than satellites that orbit it:

Let them be vapors or exhalations then, or clouds, or fumes sent out from the Sun’s globe.
Or, let them be blown kisses sent on the backs of fierce atmospheric windstorms.

one technique is to not use a title at all
Mike Blouin

if Jesus died on that cross, and someone by that name

or one like it, almost certainly

did

it was not to ascend to heaven

but to become truly human, I mean, that’s the point isn’t it, of that moment

the title of the video is “man kicks dog” and he does, in grainy black and white, he kicks the little dog for no reason and then the dog chases him and he trips and falls into a snowbank and then he gets up and he keeps walking, you can tell that in the silence he yells back at the dog and that the dog doesn’t care you can tell that he’d like to kick the dog again, but he can’t

we are ridiculous, most of the time

to become human is a folly, I mean, that’s the point… isn’t it?

Most of the time this world seems like a stranger’s house to me, or a house in a dream

everything keeps shifting

I can’t find the toaster, so a door would be out of the question

and that’s as plain as a pig on a sofa.

The Future Imperfect
Marc Di Saverio

Although my hand is guided by the hand of God —
although I am the voice of one who’s crying in the wilderness —
O do not marvel at me; my free hand is flawed;

marvel at my Maker — marvel at his unshod
King of Kings whose wound-beams bless forth life-end tunnel-lights for us;
although my hand is guided by the hand of God

do rival palms hold fit to prayer-press? Am I a fraud,
or, like Moses, and others, do I speak His words and yet transgress?
O do not marvel at me; my free hand is flawed

and offends me, and offends us; should my free hand be sawed,
to set sail my ported soul, anchored by my sin-stress?
Although my hand is guided by the hand of God,

marvel at the model Christ; to be jaw-dropped and awed
by me, while reading the Almighty’s verses, is blasphemy? Yes!
O do not marvel at me; my free hand is flawed!

O pray for my perfecting, reader, and never laud
me; laurel the head of the Lord, alone, so my soul may progress.
Although my hand is guided by the hand of God,
O do not marvel at me; my free hand is flawed.

REASONS
Tara Borin

We drink because the sun never sets or
because it never rises.

To find love, distorted by the empty bottle’s lens.
To hush the heart.
To soothe unwritten stories.
We drink the wounds of our parents
and of their parents
and theirs.

We drink to dull the throb of an abscessed tooth.
To stop our hands from shaking.
Because it’s happy hour.
We drink without even having to think about it,
            Because it feels good
                                                to lose control,
                                                                        feels like regaining it.

We drink to see the sky shift above us and
            feel the earth wheel beneath our feet.
We drink our youth until it’s dry and then
            we drink to all the ends.
Our wins and losses—
            they taste the same.
To you who would judge us, and you who would join us
            and you who have already gone.

Nathaniel G. Moore

Nathaniel G. Moore is a writer, artist and publishing consultant grateful to be living on the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) and Mi'kmaq peoples.