The World Already on Fire: Dzvinia Orlowsky’s Bad Harvest
Bad Harvest is a resonant folk song that fills the chambers of the future with echoes of the past. Its complex twists of hereditary and personal relations with language and work open a chasm of concern for the future that Dzvinia Orlowsky locates and does a little dance on the edge of. She stares openly, even mockingly, into the pit of impermanence and unpredictability, spinning the prescribed doom and mortality of what we all know shall end: health, love, and livelihood.
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No One Should Feel That Alone
Jane was handing someone a bouquet of satay, / gushing about Muller’s Foreign Cinema and Laszlo, / when I told her about the abortion. A party / not the best place to breathe new disclosures, to say: / The baby would be three years old now.
Homecoming
Finally the war was over / we could go home but / wife was wary. Those houses? / said, watching the news. / >Those stores? schools? police? Fake. / believe what you see.
Two Poems
Lashed & anchored to the front of each ship, / a woman—breasts carved from dark oak, / all the wildness sanded down, polished out; / half human, half fish, a grotesque fantasy
Incarnate
Two wolves mating and then / at rest, the carnal moment just caught.
Snakes
In Ghana, I was warned, all snakes are poisonous. All ninety-two species. If you are bitten, you have to grab the snake and take it along to the hospital so they can give you the correct antivenin. Assuming they have antivenin. And assuming there’s a hospital.
Three Poems
She keeps verbs in their bee box / until they all are queens. She keeps / words clean as the bowel of a sink.
My Jewish Beard
These past few months, I’ve taken great amusement in others’ reactions to my newly bushy beard, and in their questioning why I’ve chosen to let it grow so full and long now that I’ve turned 60 and my beard has turned white.
Criminals We Know
The British call seagulls the “thugs” of the bird world. They “detest” the birds for snatching food from picnic tables and depositing splotches on cars. Pigeons and magpies come next on the list of most loathed, followed a few slots down by the unlikely sparrow who is simply “dull looking,” a criticism that seems dubious coming from a populace of oxfords, woolens, and tweeds.
The Poem
arrives like a serrated wing. / Cuts the medium on which it is inscribed. / Cuts the fabric of the real.
The Violence of Collision: Notes on Collage, Precarity & the Archive
In a co-authored essay, Priti Joshi and Susan Zieger observe that “Ephemerality might be described as the lived condition of an industrial modernity, founded on disposability, fluctuating value, and illusion.”
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