“I tend to refer to most of it as the territory of Ghost Soil. It certainly isn’t a narrow genre. Whatever you call it, it should dance away from easy definition. […] [F]or me, part of it was a knowing that given the way the national narrative was going, this vital space was going to …
All the Trees That Have Perished Alongside My Childhood, by Bogi Takács Keep Reading »
The Universe eats itself until there is nothing but air and space nothing but you and me. I am the God of Undoing, your breath my playground. I leave you bleeding, panting, desperate. For something you are unsure of, for blood, for spite, for the rivers of me pushing forth engulfing, drowning, saturating. Blurring the …
I picture you at your typewriterimpossibly young in the blackand white world of the 1950swriting I Bury the Livingyears before my birthyour father over ten years gone black pins imbuedwith the power of deathwhen pushed into vacant plotson a cemetery mapI wonder how you came upwith that idea you were always devisingmovie premises at …
I It goes up, forever. Changes the sky’s color.A howl in the sere grass. A death, root-sunken,resonates down into the water table, nested ringsof shale and lava. A tremble in the hand, a shiver. It lasts a thousand years. Unknits your cells,decays you from core code outwards. Your veins unravel,spill black pus and yellow, …
Everything washes away,Red running down to silver against zinc.The tools are set aside. The voices stay,Locked in drawers at the end of the shift. Red runs down to silver in the sink,the last of the parking lot, the ditch, the cooler.Behind closed doors, at the end of the shift,death’s scent is lemon; sour masking sweet. …
An enterprising chooser of the slainThought to select him: not Death,As he had feared, but surely Her bondsmanTherefore to stay and fightAmong the bright blades, his own way.Haber agreed readily; Nobel was relievedTo see the wounds spring back healedEach night, all forgiven at the feast.They had seen sad-eyed warriors before. Robert,Chewing his pipestem, nerves still …
When I died I rose to meet myself, not quite as shadowed leaves touch leaves that fall on water, meeting palm to palm. Then verges ever on the yet-to-be, is never this, now, here. Nowhere a kiss, and onward from that instant O and O. I wake no travelling. On either bank, the trees are …
The Fates persist in fractal layers,the tapestry they weave spreads fingers, grips skeinsthe work itself a weaver,that winds yet another copythrough the warp, piling colorsuntil the shuttle gives riseto coils of minute artisans, who wind the reverse sidesof countless lives until the scene that draws me out arrives, threading stone and flesh, kings, priests and …
Turn back from these precipices,where the wind strikes its wind harp with jagged fingers of rock and bone.Sure, you died, but that’s not the rare jewel you think it is. You don’t get to call me as if you own me, as if you know me, to ask for anything from me. You seek the forgotten powers, but I …
The amount of architecture requiredto ferry the dead must be momentous: train tracks of finely wrought silver runacross the shores by the black rivers, shuddering near each otherwith calculated blasts of power. Over the gray dust speed the carsof the dead; on the far bank she stands and cries where are you, far from the …
