CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive
Matthew Gagnon
The Tabernacle
But it is nothing
that stands against the welter of impact
dog-eared with dusk a projection
of dusk
its lack of light reported on tile
finds a foundation
its violence
perfectly contained
closes there
in the body
pierced by coherence—
its archways and aqueducts sunken charts
and basins of overflowing light
that shelters nobody
no body
as sown to its den
A Subject Trace
He awaits the breaking
news of the nuclei flaking outward
absorbed onto a surface
of inducement
He is at once a subject whipsawed
with a greater efficiency
From his commission
recanted in microtone
the moist earth is unafraid
of brutality
arid static channels of devotion
Memoria Technica
Between the body’s
capital and its harbor,
a stratagem of circuits are in gradual exposure.
There’s no power
to persuasion, nothing
disrobes or welcomes
your combine parceled to the cinder,
nothing severs
or liquidates
its application.
Provide a feeding tube.
All the toothless blades
are enough.
Gash me, here.
An unstitched hem is astray.
Detonation Point
Say this isn’t why
we detonate.
We molt out of a habit,
its ideas that wash us
blank, back into a variable.
I brace for the dust
cloud, an ocean
that goes uninjured,
an ocean I stand beside,
shoreless, an ocean that cannot
say ‘aglow’ behind my eyes.
Matthew Gagnon’s reviews and essays can be found in Jacket, The Literary Review, and The Poker, among others. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Nation. He currently lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife.
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