Back to Issue Thirty-Four

A NOTE on form

BY JOS CHARLES

 

Do not die, they say,
at least today—filled with sense—
the pocket of city-planted shrubs
lining the street—like a mind, not built,
they say, but given Concrete, the road,
the paint bucket in the arm of a man
spilling dashed-lines to a road It is sense
he makes & the ash from hills (these
too are desert hills) spill to the road
where we do not speak of poetry—a bridge
built to burn itself, not unlike a mind
What would open fire mean, having opened
every fire, boundless open every lung, & stoking
fire I do not know what else there is, at times,
narrative, material split from raw material,
or preserving the split only to talk on
a mezzanine later of men, the wood
we live & place ourselves to under
a star of branch & wire
the unsayable possible
in line to say, this
was our desire

 

 

A NOTE on form

BY JOS CHARLES

 

Never having lived
among things, but beside
forms of things, I no longer
look where the city lifts a little
further, past houses, oceans,
light from a crane, breathing,
no longer looking the child
hurried beside a mother moving
too, too fast at what escapes
the grasp of leaves & awnings
of leaves, past what is lifted
up, whatever word lifted from
whatever throat it’s lodged—
there being only one throat
between us—past perception,
(anything but arrangement)
& nevertheless perceiving,
as we must, what moves between
us, quickening, no longer a roof,
but atmosphere, precursor
& remnant of speech, remaining,
as it must, perhaps, the least
effective of our music

 

Jos Charles is author of feeld, a National Book Award long-listed finalist and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series, selected by Fady Joudah (Milkweed Editions) and Safe Space (Ahsahta Press).  Charles has poetry published with POETRY, Poem-a-Day, PEN, Washington Square Review, Denver Quarterly, Action Yes, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere. Charles’ writing has been featured on BitchMedia, Entropy, GLAAD, LAMBDA Literary, and elsewhere. In 2016 she received the Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship through the Poetry Foundation. In 2015 she received the Monique Wittig Writer’s Scholarship. Jos Charles has an MFA from the University of Arizona. From 2013-2018 she served as the founding-editor for THEM lit, a trans literary journal. She is a PhD student at UC Irvine and currently resides in Long Beach, CA.

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