Online Exclusives

In Situ

Sometimes the language tenders its own
resonant edge, as when one reads

of how the remains remain submerged, as in
in-place drownings of forests.

I first read of their somber strains in
a letter speaking of being consumed,

in French la noyade, the name of a scent
mixed from blood cedarwood,

maritime pine, cypress, onycha tincture,
seaweed, a song sunk enough to

call it sodden. There is nothing heavier
than an unnamed waterlog that longs

to be sounded if not instinctively spelled.
I should say must, instinctively, note [...]

I Am Who Sent Me

To have died in youth and remain.
To be good with that.

To forget now who was speaking.
Someone was always speaking.

To be in the yesterday of today,
lost in the morning’s psychotropic green.

But the verb is to be, to be vigilant
and hungry across time

along with the words “I love”
blinking in the face of it. [...]

Hello, piggies, who snore, root, farrow
and brave. Welcome piggies, though, more
accurately: welcome to me. I welcome
myself into your midst. I’ve arrived here
after a long journey from that plane only
marginally lower than this one, but 
from which it’s nearly impossible to ascend.

Piggies, as recently as two clicks ago, you would’ve 
found me down there, pouring molten gold into small 
mammalian skulls tidily excavated from owl pellets 
and spring floods. Mole, vole, shrew, more. Cauldron, 
ladle, funnel, fill. Cool. The cracks and hollows, sockets 
and circuits, now gaping, now all silent gold. [...]

The relict lay reading in the contractor’s bad grass. I used to breathe sleep eat poetry. Until could not see to read except the large-print books, mysteries, tell-alls, and how to build waterfalls, but could see the hollows in the small of his buttocks, the fair hair feathering into his pitchy seam.

I could see rings of brilliance 
beyond any visible human means. [...]

Alice was actually a labeler and not a pickler. Still, she knew what Mr. H’s picklers did was nothing like her grandmother’s pickling, sweaty and stained and clouded by hot vinegar steam, shoveling already rotting vegetables into their boiling bath like some kind of unbelieving prayer. Everyone winced when eating what came out of her grandmother’s pickle jars. Mr. H’s were made of faceted clear glass, and the bobbing pickles inside were a bright, inviting candy-green. To look at one was to feel it snip crisply between your teeth, to set your mouth watering. Alice was midwife to that salivary burst. That was what she dressed up for. Today it mattered even more than usual. [...]

I SAW ALL THE STRANGENESS IMMEDIATELY,

I saw it in this very particular slide of swell’s,
the sylphspun silk of the sylph, she sideways,
her garage is paradise in masque, her sweep
is saturn, szturn im sturm & string, install’d
in the area’s traverse. he follows that lucky
old sun, the gesture of her lining and loose
knot, and pulls herself through burns and a
dry wash and some soft lead. in discorporate
minerals, or in the sharing of the black sleek
sharing with the wild man in her soft shoes,
all over the panes of the various sworld and
out into the superhighway of bywater, hard
by marigny. to flow through one to another
indetermination, the posture of their brush
must be immaculate fray, all them, all they. [...]

Day Book

One wants to grasp a latch.
The broken star, the cellophane.
One suffers if untethered from
the pain that brought a lock.
Across the way the husband tends his teeth.
The wife redresses, parted from her paper.
To emblemize, to separate the word
grief reaches. Grief reaches, unseduced. [...]

He had thought for a while of having his ashes placed on a ship propelled out to sea while being set aflame with burning arrows—in his dotage, my father grew obsessed with Norse myth—but in today’s regulatory environment, bringing him here was the closest feasible compromise. “The best moment is when Fenris the giant wolf appears,” he’d told me on Zoom, his voice trembling only slightly. “It draws everyone’s attention, so nobody will be watching you. Do you remember how you used to cry when we got to the wolf?” This sounds more like something Ulf would do, although Ulf doesn’t remember coming here either. Most likely it was a lost intention of my father’s. He might have spent a day talking to strangers in a bar about planning a trip here, an imagined bout of quality time so vivid it became real for him in retrospect. Towards the end, the winter and the lockdown getting to him, my father was drinking forty ounces of vodka a day. I may not have been his favorite son, but I was the one who agreed to scatter his ashes here once, and if, the park reopened after COVID. Ulf would never violate theme park rules. [...]

Slay

         “O orzchis ecclesia ... es chorzta gemma”
                          – Sibyl of the Rhine

O measureless church ... you are a sparkling gem scored
from the lingua ignota, the language of the
unknown. Secret tongue of the sleepless alphabet.
You probe the lowest bass of body’s dark matter.
I swing my hips to your rebel science of spheres.

When you asked if your poem was controversial
I consulted a Penrose diagram made to
see the entirety of spacetime through a black
hole. Light rays at the beginning of everything
null infinity, the channel we now ignore.

So here I am, back at the counterculture, that
open tower in the sky. It travels through the
city within the floating city, wavering
like heat on flexed concrete. I dream of the fractal
fuel we used to turn into optimal stanzas. [...]

She named the dog after a Hollywood actor, someone she had shared a scene with once. She had only one line in the film. She looks straight at the camera with her famous dark eyes—someone once called them wounds—and asks or says, A beautiful view?  This was supposed to hint at one of her current scandals. Once, on one of those rare nights when she asked me to sit with her after dinner, her face red with port, which she drank out of those miniature crystal glasses you have to hold with your fingertips, she said, That’s your father’s name. Of course, the years don’t add up, but then my mother was never interested in the truth, or rather, her truth was fluid, changing with circumstance or whim. But she didn’t lie, she believed whatever she said completely. This, more than anything else, was why men fell in love with her. [...]

The Inside of a Wolf

I gut the wolf. All I find is a hole/and I follow/the hole farther in and farther/into earth shaped like a great sigh./The earth, open and airy/as sky. The earth is blue/as thought inside, farther/and further, the wandering/into earth, until a great opening opens/up beneath the hole/and suddenly nothing has a body. Nothing/has a body but me. Into the belly/of the wolf I fall, farther/and forward into emptiness. Inside/the earth is blue. Blue/is the absence of all/earth, all body, and I tumble into blue/so shattering, so empty/all body comes/back, a kind of courage, holding on to one’s body, so/tight, while tumbling/and turning/into a sigh. Holding on/to one’s body so tight/all breath is lost. Falling/into the earth, so careless/with its emptiness, so daring,/hiding inside a wolf, the moon’s mouth. [...]

Olga’s coworker, known privately as her Work Wife, had said the wrong thing about Olga’s new haircut. “It doesn’t look like the photo you showed me,” she’d said. This is what the Work Wife fixated on, rather than the glory of the haircut before her. The Work Wife said something else about the staff potluck later that day, but Olga could barely hear her. She cut the conversation short and walked back to her cubicle. Olga could feel the Work Wife rolling her eyes. It was ruined between them now, at least for the day.
     The Work Wife had said other things to her over the years.
     During a discussion of celebrity lookalikes: “You have a striking resemblance to Anne Frank.”
     After Olga had accidentally, horribly, dug a deep, slow-to-heal hole in her cheek while popping a pimple and tried to hide it with makeup: “What happened to your face? Asking as a friend.”
     And yet, how Olga loved her, the Work Wife.
     And yet, how she hated her, the Work Wife. [...]

Amid the storm, a phantom

formerly Coronado remarks:

“I was the beating heart inside

that insidious breastplate.”

Between bursts of hailstones

his companion confesses,

“I was the low-level prelate

sent to raise a clay church and

ring the altar with paintings

of the most fantastic torments.”

The rain’s fierce silver slashes

red hills above a spatter of cactus.

A fringe of lightning, unfurling

from a black cloud, tears apart

some first and final place.

Old ghosts fade out, become

songbirds at the cusp of

the mating season. [...]

When you were the size of a fist, a coyote dragged a three-year-old Angeleno out of the living room by the Peter Pan collar of her pale yellow shirt. She survived but was left with a sizable scar on her cheek. The scar resembled an American flag, pocks for stars and gouges for stripes. Her mother was on the news all the time, which led to the child signing a deal with an agency, and quite soon after that, the child and her scar started appearing on billboards as the new face of a California restaurant chain that sold bratwursts. Last month, for reasons unrelated, the little girl passed away. 
     The querent used to say we come back as either human or animal, that in the spirit world, there is no delineation.
     It’s nice to think the end isn’t the end. 
     Though I wouldn’t dare say that to the dead girl’s mother. [...]

What we had done was trample on Johnson’s city, four sheets of paper, loosely placed side by side, with buildings growing in no particular visual perspective, some upwards, some in profile, some in three dimensions but others in blueprint, and this, we felt intuitively, was a triumph of Johnson’s city, or would-be city, it’s resistance to confinement, its ability to transcend.

And we sat with Johnson. We consoled. We patted Johnson on the back and said that we might rebuild it, that it could be rebuilt. That it could be better and that we could help.

We collected the roll of white butcher paper from its mount and unfurled it across the linoleum, gathered the colored pencils, the crayons and scented markers and watercolors and even the Sharpies we’d hidden in our cubbies. We collected scissors and Scotch tape, and began to connect the sheets of paper, for there would be no limit to what we could design. [...]

Nocturne

Midnight at the pit of my irrelevance:
     a hair’s breadth away, I step closer to the mouth of it, no more afraid to
shake hands with my lacuna than a bird is of the air
     whistling in its bones. To stay possible as long as possible

had felt like enough now—a persistence of streaks
     in soft butter yellow shed from the clock tower onto the indigo-
freaked slate-to-black vagueness
     that indicates the river. The light lives
  [...]

Silence

I thought I was good because I had borne the brunt of society’s manhandling, because through halls
of terror I fled and gangs of girls followed me, seeking to press thumbs deep into
my arms, cheeks, back of my neck, thighs, because goodness lay heavy in the air around me, because
most around me were powerful underprivileged role models, I thought it good enough
to know and read vexatious histories and in my own private sanctum feel the pain, to dwell
in sorrow through theater and dance, that just by being around, goodness could rub off on a person [...]

The island appeared in the playa –
            a thick family of vegetation in sand
            as if risen from the undulation of blued snow over
            grasses, purple. Huddling
            through time, as bodies green and dark
            in me knew better, yet compelled me
            to run from the tall thick house
            where I lay resting
            and take refuge from the wind
            where wind blew.
  [...]

The feet trudge the path of the eyes.

Vouch for snow-covered trails skirted by galvanic tamaracks,
the previous fall’s needles a carpet of #2 pins.

Vouch for garrulous waxwings captivating powerlines,
mesmerizing middle C and rising,
coloratura clouds.

Vouch for the rich acoustic world of moths
fallen silent, streets of pupal stillness,
bodies suspended in glycerol sleep. [...]

I. THE SYMMETRY

In the beginning, they told us that only babies born with a herringbone of downy fuzz running the full length of their spines carried the gene. Then it was the nostrils: if one was larger than the other. From there, it grew into a hysteria of symmetry. If one eye was squintier the baby was a carrier. One ear higher. One testicle smaller. Left side of the labia fatter. Oh, how Richard squirmed at this. To think of his daughter having labia; such a prickly word for his pure baby girl whom we’d designed one night on a whiz of bubbly wine and goat cheese, right down to her delicate parts. That area I engineered, being the woman and inherently more attuned to shades of pink, shapes of flower petals, and all. But, still, nothing was guaranteed. [...]

Here, they combine the knowledge of choosing words with the art of touch. Before somebody utters soft fur, they keep their hands on a dog’s head for years.

From granaries, they dispense hunger, a spice that stimulates the sense of lack. The king trusts that absence is the saltpeter of things susceptible to nonexistence: what doesn’t keep in salt will be preserved in hunger. No myth can be cut like the fabric for a coat, the halves of which will be dragged through life. Thanks to the spice, the subjects of the kingdom don’t know stale love, only unfulfilled. The professed religion is apnea. All maturing is mutiny. Red fruit get a visit from hangmen. [...]

No, that’s not it, that’s not how it happens, it’s—

—because I’m here, have been for years and years, in the backseat of the Oldsmobile 88, top down, wind enraged, tearing along some country road at night, Jackson drunk at the wheel, Ruthie by his—

—the world all quick nervous giggles and skinfizz, the whirled world, the world like leaves spinning in a crazy autumn gust, only it’s not autumn, no, that’s, it’s what, it’s— [...]

THE SPEECH OF THE THIN KING’S MINDER

The thin king bound in the fiery hollow shook
The chain by which his left arm was suspended
And from a hatch that rattled open just

Above his right eye dropped a demon like
A glass-winged gerbil, who immediately
Began to stab the thin king’s pupil with

A dripping claw, and said, Forgive me, king,
For my unwilling violence. I bite
My paws off, but they grow back while I chew

So that I wonder while I’m chewing, Is
This still my paw I’m chewing, and, forgive
Me, king, but that thought helps me swallow. [...]

He decided he would die and then
drove through mortality,

a motorcyclist in heavy traffic. He
was afraid for his dog, which he had

loved and abused. The neighbor said no
to taking it, but he died anyway and

the dog—no one knows. Cigarette butts
and dogshit left in the litter of his lawn. [...]

Tina has been watching the place between the wall and her couch for either three minutes now, or for her whole entire life. It’s two thirty in the morning—2:34, actually, which feels like fate, like either a really lucky or a really terrible number—and she’s on her way back from checking the sliding glass door, because she couldn’t remember if she’d locked it or not, and who could sleep like that? But what she can’t remember now is if there’s a tall, broad-leafed rubber plant on the far side of the couch or not, making that for-sure-there shadow fall against the pale wall in that . . . [...]

Your sister is losing her voice. It feels like it happened overnight, her lips turning into rubber, but it’s been almost four months, and your sister, who would have suffocated you for calling her doll-like, spends her days sitting by the window, looking at everything and nothing, all at once. For what it’s worth, you try to remind her of her human self. You clamp down on the flap of fat on her arms but not a pipe. A deep paper cut exacts only a hiss of air. She has long, dark Rapunzel hair that thins into her calves, and with a pair of garden scissors, you give her the first haircut she has had in sixteen years. All her history is in her hair, and that’s the problem, you think, the weight of it. [...]

Still Life With Flying Sombreros

Three sombreros hung on pegs in a cantina, where their owners stood at a bar, soaking in the tequila. The sombreros got to talking and soon discovered they all despised their owners. “My man,” a sombrero said, “came home drunk every night and beat his wife and children with a hard stick he kept just for that purpose.” Another sombrero confessed that his owner sat on a porch and shot cats that had strayed into his garden. He skinned the cats and displayed their pelts over the fireplace. [...]

                                  1.

Someone nodding, and the light pressing down
as though it had weight.
And right in the middle of what I want to say
there’s a long row of chairs. There are green,
red, yellow arches that gradually contract
and close, like doors.
Like a disease whose threshold no one can cross,
she says. [...]

Once upon a time, there was only Olga and me, as well as our old dog, Boji, in a big house we inherited from our parents, whose food we had slowly been poisoning in a span of at least a year. Our parents blamed their “chronic illness” on inclement weather, on the “heathens” who played rock music next door, sometimes on “cursed” and “possessed” appliances and furniture. [...]

birds, vital furniture for our eyes. The floor refoliates
a dozenfold. Months
these days waltz
triple-time
within us. Echoes of fundamental shapes. Great-

grandfather, Harry Houdini’s accountant.
Isaac, our cousin the Don, muscled his way into King’s spitting distance.
All told, say
the performance outlived the performer?
O [...]

She used the word alabaster too often. And breath, as if her body always knew what lay ahead,
the repetition of need. Even absence became a title. Even then long shadows danced in the room,
wind slithering under the door. There was a hint of that tricky left eye, still squinting, an itch to
become worse. Fire had its annual appearance, though not at first, and always confused with a
sense of death or doom. Throughout there was a certain rage, a questioning, “how can this be?”
Rage might be a response to events, or it might have always simmered, a disorder from birth. [...]

       Holly gives Katja another look, but doesn’t say anything. They are walking beside a long snow-covered lake. High overhead, a red-tail hawk makes its frayed, lonesome kreee. At the end of the lake, they turn and tramp atop their own tracks, hurrying to make it home before the hospice aides leave. A gun shot loud enough to thump their chests sounds in the woods straight ahead. Then another. And another. The shots continue at varying intervals, growing ever louder. Eventually, Katja and Holly come to a clearing where a young man stands just behind a young woman, his arms reaching around her so that his left hand supports hers beneath the rifle stock, and his right hand envelops hers on the trigger. The man and woman are motionless. His shoulders tremble. A gunshot echoes off of hundreds of trees. A piece of paper snaps off a target pinned to a tree and flutters to the ground.
  [...]

When you pull me from the water
Tell me I fell. Say you saw it all. How I tripped at the edge.

When you pull me from the water
Hold my face in your hands. Make my hair stand like a mountain. Turn off the bath faucet.

When you pull me from the water
Ask about my blood sugar. Worry over grapes I ate as lunch. Laugh at how I nearly slip back in.

When you pull me from the water
Wipe chiggers from my ankles. Press my skin with your x’s. Numb all the ways they bite me. [...]

She decided on a five-mile loop, walking a corridor of ashen and gray-brown tree trunks. Thistle sprouted spiky at the path’s edge, as did milkweed, their pods gray husks bent at the stems. Something in her quieted. When she got back, she’d try again with the pastels. She’d take a more delicate approach, not let herself overwork anything nor destroy her efforts even if bad.
  [...]

You fell upwards into primacy,
A response of bells and cold
Arias, clashes of mettle on metal.

Then you fell downwards
Outside of history’s grasp
Under cold covers.

You felt the weight of days.
The rolltop desk hid secrets
Of your progress. [...]

SAVED

Fear is an attentional function.
Wishes depotentize over time.


Human nature is a child
soldier. A walk on the beach


is a cold chapel where I played
cello before a panel of wooden


chairs. Religion and war are peasant
stunners, knee-high flags


on the village green. [...]

This morning, Bard College released the following statement about its earlier decision to cease publication of Conjunctions at the end of this year. While negotiations toward continuing the journal under Bard’s aegis haven’t yet begun, we trust that they will be held in good faith. 
 
I am beyond grateful to all of you for making your thoughts known, loud and clear, across various platforms. There is nothing little about “little magazines” and nothing small about “small presses.” These are the fertile proving grounds where so many writers can freely share their innovative voices and visions.

–Bradford Morrow, founder and editor of Conjunctions

Bard College Statement on Its Relationship with Conjunctions

Bard College announced this week that the fall 2022 issue of Conjunctions would be the journal’s last under the Bard imprint. Having heard the immediate, widespread, and heartfelt reaction from readers, writers, and editors alike, the College is revisiting its decision with the intention of continuing its support for the journal.

Bard sincerely regrets both the decision and process that led to it, and extends its apologies to our colleague Bradford Morrow, as well as the journal’s staff and writers, for the disruption it has caused. The College is proud of the role we have played for 30 years in supporting Conjunctions and is working directly with the journal in the hope of repairing our relationship and charting a possible path forward together. [...]

In 2021, Conjunctions marked its fortieth anniversary, a milestone celebrated by the publication of a special anniversary issue and a series of online readings, defying the pandemic in order to bring some of our contributors live before a worldwide audience.
 
What cannot be defied, as it happens, is the economic pressure the pandemic has created in both education and publishing. For the last thirty of its forty years, Conjunctions has been published by Bard College. Sadly, I’ve been informed that the cost of continuing to publish the journal has become unsustainable for the college, which has made the decision to cease publication at the end of this calendar year. As a result, our fall 2022 issue, Conjunctions:79, Onword, will be the final issue published under the Bard imprint. 

“Bard College is proud to have played a role in the extraordinary body of work created during the journal’s tenure here, enabling some of the most daring and distinguished literary voices of our time to find a home in print,” said Bard College spokesman Mark Primoff.
 
Editing and publishing a literary journal has historically never been for the faint of heart. I am deeply saddened by this turn of events, but I appreciate Bard's having been a steadfast supporter of the journal for these past three decades.

In the meantime, we will publish our spring issue as scheduled. Conjunctions:78, Fear Itself, will feature works by Coral Bracho, Stephen Graham Jones, Brandon Hobson, Shane McCrae, Bronka Nowicka, Monica Datta, Joyce Carol Oates, Rick Moody, Julia Elliott, Kristine Ong Muslim, Jeffrey Ford, Quintan Ana Wikswo, as well as two former Bard Fiction Prize winners, Bennett Sims and Akil Kumarasamy, along with many others.
 
And Conjunctions:79, Onword, will feature some of the great pioneering writers of innovative poetry and prose whose work we have championed since their debuts or earliest publications, together with those whose voices are now just emerging. Our weekly online publication—widely read by an international audience—will also continue through the end of the year, offering exciting new writing and selections from the journal's vast archives. We intend to preserve the Conjunctions website as a legacy archive for everyone to access.
 
We hope that you, our cherished, far-flung family of readers and writers, will enjoy these forthcoming issues and join us in celebrating the living notebook that has always been Conjunctions.

—Bradford Morrow, founder and editor of Conjunctions [...]

I was indoctrinated early in the limits of good intentions.
How could I love and still have done the cruelest thing I said I didn’t?
Now I wait for my brother to call, though he hasn’t for years,

                                                                                                 because
that is how I’ll know that what I feared since childhood
is real. [...]

She started to tell me a story about a friend of a friend, that she heard relayed online. The dog sprinted ahead to retrieve a ball that I pelted as far as I could. The dog brought the ball back to me, dropped it at my feet. I picked it up and flung it again, and off the dog sprinted, again. We interrupted her, mid-sentence: the dog with its return of the ball and my need to take a couple of steps to build up momentum for my pitch of the ball as far as my tiring, left arm allowed. How hard for her to tell her story in these conditions. I did this several times before she asked me, irritably, if I wanted to hear the story or not. [...]

I took an empty vinegar bottle

filled it with tap water

and slowly emptied it

searching for an allegory

I settled for a purge [...]

      While strangers come and go at the estate sale a town of sparrows overtakes a fallen limb twittering their news pecking for position dominating and submitting. The birds stay like a restlessness can stay until the light leaps from the house tears over the trees and the hills. I walk as a ghost in the yellow house touch the china on their table stand beside the bed they sailed in buy one of their many books on theosophy. I fall in love with the lovers and their old-fashioned names take up my place on their bench watching their house for its story.

          The Buddha watches emptiness. He is unemployed a beggar possibly crazy. He lives outside the law on public land against the principle that state and church are separate. No wonder he keeps getting arrested and removed. [...]

November 7, 2019


          At midday it’s still warm enough to swim. They take a long hot shower afterwards. By the evening it’s cool, and swimming seems audacious. Helen heats up soup and toasts day-old bread, which is enough for dinner. They have clementines for dessert, peeling them without speaking. Her hair has dried before she’s combed out her cowlick.

          Nabil has taught her it’s okay not to talk, to just hang on and trust that someone will stay close. When they were first together, she still talked so much, which was how she had always been: pressing, driving, insisting on understanding, revealing. But there is so much neither will ever know about the other. They have lived so much life prior to meeting. [...]

It is a hot day out there and here inside the raw cool moronic hum of the conveyer you’re soothed by the song of that flat black path transporting items at a safe, considered pace to the terminus of this shopping haul, the ambulatory beeps from the cashier's key-padding or her face or the crown of her head or wherever the fuck it’s leaking out, this woman’s disinterest, her analog margin of error tempered through skilled human agency, foolproof PLUs, printed receipt. Love this grocery. You can’t go wrong here. [...]

Now that the little lies
            accrue into the vast
incredulity, fear on fear
            swells: a wave.

Slipping down the dune or
            climbing? Who can tell?
The small cries, growing smaller,
            fly past and vanish. [...]

The hope of non-sleepers is sleep, sleep is the food of all living presence, and time is the food of sleep. Time is a physiological condition, in addition to being a pit of holes. Sleep and wake are genres. Despite all appearances to the contrary, and notwithstanding dreams, sleep is a season. If you jump ahead, skip episodes of sleep, fragment the night, you lose the poetry of daytime. Daytime becomes a plot-driven slog; all it thinks about is sleep. [...]

The trees conspiring to create eternity again.
Our bodies with every tendon, sheath, and auricle
intending to grow old again. Breath finding wings,
lungs, skin. Hearts becoming rooms, again. [...]