Four Poems by Mark Young

A line from David Byrne

 

The gauge is altered — we didn't

cast on enough stitches. But then

it's not essential to make a huge

impact on the world's environment

 

to present a fundamental threat to

human health. When blood flows

backwards, absorbs red light, re-

flects infrared, it sets off a set of

 

catalytic converters by changing

their trains to allow the release

of pollutants through chemical re-

actions. Exhaustion must follow.

 

 

salad dweller

 

When it comes to debt ac-

cumulation, the young

lotus leaf, a new release

of the original 1913 edit-

ion, is ideal for industry

professionals & insurance

lawyers. It has served as

personal physician to Duke

 

Albert I of Saxony, & has a

single metal wheel mounted

on painted wood. Nearby, we

also have today a number

of helpful YouTube videos

crafted from my best recipes.

 

 

Seismic Intervention

 

Can't get enough physical phe-

nomena involving catastrophes

or Laplace equations in two &

three dimensions to fill a bath

 

for charity? The French Institute

of Health & Medical Research

suggests that the visco-elastic

properties of certain polymers

 

kept perpendicular to the neces-

sary inbetweens in an ivory box

with an embossed tone-on-tone

floral pattern will cause a heat-

 

wave in Gujarat; & as an embel-

lishment, using an Ariana Grande

download would be like spread-

ing peanut butter on top of jelly.

 

 

Meanwhile, at the Kunstmuseum

 

A freight train goes by as I am

listening to Bach's Air on the

G String. It howls in the night.

Pizzicato cellos follow it through

at a walking pace. All vision im-

pairment stems from a simple

cause which has nothing to do

with the eyes. & then I'm in

Lithuania, in Vilnus, & an a

cappella choir tracks the same path

as the freight train. Home security

companies don't want you to find

out about this new device that is

cheaper, simpler, created by two

engineers from Australia, by which

time, in a baroque hall, a seated

string group line up behind some

very popular cellist & it's last year

in Marienbad, where a several hun-

dred voice male Mormon choir

tells me it's nearer my god to thee

which means we're heading back

to a basilica in Milan where Booker

T is dining out on a mix of green

onions & listening to some serious

players & I'm replaying all the

poems I've written over the years

that have Bach as counterpoint.

Thank You Again, by Lard Alec

            A signature feature of precarious labor is that you always seem to be applying for the job you already have. About eight or nine years ago, one of the schools where I was teaching, Miller University[1], hired a new First-Year Writing Director, Joan[2]. Joan sent out a friendly email or two, by way of introduction, before requesting CVs and old teaching evaluations from everyone in MU’s lumpen adjunct corps. It was as though all the people who had taught there for years were suddenly new because their boss was new. In this case, the old director, Ron[3], hadn’t left; he lingered somewhere down the hall, and his office was, at most, a 30 second walk from Joan’s. Ron had all our shit, unless he, I don’t know, lost it, so why didn’t she pester him? And why didn’t he volunteer it once he learned, if ever, that she wanted it?

            Everything she needed, of course, was redundantly filed away with various office managers, faculty, and 2^nd-tier deans. It made me wonder if similar collection efforts in the past had amounted to some kind of bureaucratic scam: file dumps to Potemkin Dropbox accounts in an elaborate pantomime of due diligence[4]. “Yeah, sure,” a sweaty administrator, violently loosening his tie, says to a frowning auditor, “we got all those records around here someplace. Heh, heh.”

Or maybe Joan didn’t want to settle for last semester’s CVs, since we might have won a Pulitzer in the meantime, but even so, she should have been able to book classes for the fall by referring to extant schedule requests. If memory serves, we had to do those again, too. In the end, working at Miller University meant working at Joan University[5], at least for a while.

This was Joan’s first job out of grad school, and it’s possible she was extemporizing her ass off, eschewing institutional tradition and memory because she didn’t know better. Or because she didn’t care.  Still, we weren’t, on paper, guaranteed much of anything, which made it basically impossible for her, or anyone, to mistreat us. We could have complained, and sometimes we did, but our complaints were categorically irrelevant.

Around the same time, I got a job teaching at Lexus University[6], which is an MBA program with an expensive college dangling beneath it. I taught at both Miller and Lexus until the Pandemic started, at which point I began managing a neurotic public-school franchise and daycare in my house while my wife typed furiously in a makeshift office upstairs. Once the PANDEMIC WAS OVER, I was offered a few classes at Lexus, but there was a catch. Since I’d been dormant for a few semesters, I had to formally and officially reapply, which meant I had to furnish letters of recommendation and transcripts, notarize some fucking form—I can’t remember what it was now—and take a background check (they were probably scanning for book awards I had inadvertently excluded from my CV) all over again. The background check came up empty; unfortunately, the two-bit, vaporware subcontractor who conducted it was breached, and my personal information was exposed to potentially nefarious actors. The whole process was pointless, time-consuming, insulting, and possibly damaging to my financial future, but, technically, I should be thankful I’m not forced to do this each and every semester that I teach at any college in the US. 

~

About 10 years ago, I was wrapping up what I thought was a pretty successful semester at MU. I was lucky enough that spring to have a class full of smart, engaged, and talkative students who gave me the feeling of actually teaching something instead of—and this is not altogether uncommon—merely administering some necessary but irrelevant procedural punishment to listless degree seekers. I was in a good mood. I had been clear in terms of course goals and expectations and had run my classes with purpose and efficiency.

It is not solely at my discretion whether I run a class with purpose and efficiency. I depend on collaborators to endorse and ratify the social contract implied by my syllabus and actions as a teacher. If a clear majority or even a persuasive minority of students adopts the terms and standards I’ve set forth, then the nature of our common enterprise is unambiguous and destined for success. But when the social contract of an expertly crafted syllabus is rejected or simply ignored by the majority, there’s no appealing to reason or common sense. In such cases, students don’t participate in class so much as work around it and then, when forced, litigate, countersue, and lie to avoid accountability of any sort.  In such cases, everything is unclear, and even simple concepts require strenuous, detailed explanations, which are summarily ignored. Students who couldn’t be troubled to question a single assumption in any other context suddenly question everything. Write a rhetorical analysis of X becomes “What do you mean by analysis?” When you explain (or, in all likelihood, re-explain) what analysis is, they look at their phones. Later, when you return their essays with doleful but subtly inflated grades, they object and say they didn’t understand what you meant by analysis, or rhetoric, for that matter, so could you inflate their grades a bit more? Your ensuing round of explanations won’t pierce their misunderstanding because they don’t pay attention to, care about, or remember what you say. Their fundamental belief is that everything they didn’t do, learn, or look up was your fault because you should have made everything clear to them even as they avoided clarity with all their might.

In this particular class, I didn’t have many clarity-avoiders, and those I did were cowed by the competence and excellence that surrounded them. All except one. Dimitrious came to the final exam brimming with the twitchy impersonation of wounded pride. You see, Dimitrious had missed so many assignments and classes that he wasn’t even eligible to take the final exam. His goose was already cooked, and he knew as much going in. But! He didn’t like the idea of having a cooked goose. Instead, he wanted to have an uncooked goose with maybe a golden egg or two stuffed up its ass. The golden egg, in this case, was the A+ he was going to get on his final exam, which would rescue his class grade and possibly his college career.

As I passed out bluebooks, I watched him quiver in anticipation of the tantrum he was about to throw. It was all scripted. He was waiting for me to deliver my line so he could deliver his. He was like a Dostoyevsky character, who preferred staging an embarrassing farce of righteous indignation to shuffling away, unremembered. When I got to his desk, I explained, in the voice of a children’s librarian, that he couldn’t take the test because of his many preceding failures, at which point he huffed and spasmed in his best approximation of offense, before fleeing in a disheveled rush. Like a silent movie character unjustly accused of a crime, he had no recourse to speech, only stock, exaggerated gestures of protest.

He found his tongue later when he opened a seething laptop and sputter-typed an unpersuasive account of his virtues and my flaws. All of this was charming enough, but Dimitrious saved the best for last when he signed off, with grandiose sulkiness, “thank you again for a terrible semester.” Never mind that he hadn’t thanked me a first time.

~

Not every semester is terrible in the sense that Dimitrious meant. Many of them are pleasant enough. Most students don’t know that you are segregated from and exploited more thoroughly than another sort of professor, and think of you, if at all, as a qualified and sort of friendly obstacle between them and their dreams.

But there is no dignity in the work. You do not, in the eyes of administration or your tenured second cousins, once removed, gain professional experience and expertise over time so much as fail to advance. The longer you stick around, the more your storied but contingent work life becomes a parody of tenure.  You are a depreciating asset, and, thus, you cannot, in good conscience, regard the job as a career[7].

Ultimately, you are just a person who is hired for one semester and one semester only. Whether you win a teaching award or find yourself consistently savaged on student evaluations scarcely matters. Everything—excellence, mediocrity, incompetence—is a red flag eventually, and nothing is yours unless they say so. And so, whether or not someone writes a perfunctory email to your ratty listserv, congratulating you on a job well done—usually a day or two before your break[8] has actually started—the message is always the same: “thank you again,” whoever you are, “for a terrible semester.”

---

[1] A fake-ass name.

[2] Ibid

[3] I wish.

[4] This was the longstanding suspicion of my erstwhile colleague, Doug. For example, MU collects copies of student term papers every semester, evidently for evaluative purposes, but who knows? In one case, they asked instructors to dump the papers into a literal recycling bin, which seemed like a tacit confession that no further review would be forthcoming.

[5] Joan was, if I’m to capture her in a phrase, a champion of the dagger-toothed “friendly reminder” email. I even considered naming her Friendly Reminder above.

[6] Fake!

[7]  To me, it all feels like punishment for something I did in a previous life, an unremembered transgression that will only be explained fully at the end of time.

[8] Or LAYOFF.

Three Poems by Mark DuCharme

Chat

1.

At day’s edges

The chatterers gather

For a lark, on a spree

As the zoom call stalls

At unstable spaces

Gifted with multiplexes

A common tongue

Mistaken for vocabulary

Whose ancient abrasions

Adhere

To footnotes & bombs—

An aviary of blasted Spanish

Mistaken for a gift demagoguery

Of the social banal

When you’d strum, surveilled

If looks could be palliative

As wind’s high, cool

Mirth—

2.

Don’t cross out the libation parade

Become interwoven with orchards—

Windblown

When everything else becomes rank

Like mired cameras—

Changing tune’s grasp of heaven

Necessary with peaches & alto

Suffering

In corners of a loss the wind

Accrues

In the cart no one reveals

 

Of Finches

Burnt magic

A dullard’s tongue

Sand & alembic

Pay truth to flame

The ruined voice of the goth quitting specialist

Pays truth to amber

In a national somewhere

That scuttles all the landmarks that you rarely even sing

If we are

Ourselves, as finches—

A likely outpour

As truth to flame in failed ghost presences—

Abetted breccia

Through which we often all are just stale news—

Be false, be favored

By nuance

Buy in, think twice

Listen to your lover’s advice

In quaint back rooms, where reason

Often feels

 

 

The Greengrocer Goes Nest Building

 

Those who imbricate calypsos

        Are not red

Except when assaulted by ukulele tuners,

    Lank ghost materialists.

Blink three times & tell me you’re nobody.

The wind is lost ghost material

Unlikely to become

                                A rumor, what am I?

Think, if possible, to avoid being anyone

        Sometimes, in reverse

Even if unhoused mourners lack

                        The thrill you must become.

 

 

Mark DuCharme

Guests, by Barbara Anna Gaiardoni

strawberry moon
alternate universes
don't stay put

Granny comes out with a wooden spoon. “Try sweet potato instead of white potato,” she announces.
That is the signal that we should stop what we are doing because it's exactly the right time, because to enjoy his sweet potato cake on the terrace, accompanied by sweet potato chips and palm honey.
Obviously the sun disappeared in the meanwhile and pics of Grandma serving the cake are unwatchable. But we go beyond those things because our noses keep us in the present.

panic . . .
a queen bee tied
to her chin 

Three Poems by Stephen Bett

A.S. Byatt, Possession (opening lines)

 

The book was thick and black and covered with dust. Its boards were bowed and creaking; it had been maltreated in its own time. Its spine was missing…. It was bandaged about and about with dirty white tape, tied in a neat bow.

 

 

Book me a passage —     bowed by age

I’m on board with creaking

 

My spine missing

 

Treat myself for mal du doute

 

Let them eat bandages (caked in blood

 

I have bad images

 

Dirt white trash ever’where, cult-like

buzzing imagined seventh function

 

Tape their noise, tie ’em up

sure aint neat freaks

 

A-boot & a-boot —    eh, flyboys

 

Mine in-jokes galore, archival,

whoopie who cares?

 

Y are we at this?

These B’s, mistreated herein,

in a bow…   done

 

Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveller (trans, William Weaver)

 

Opening lines: You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.

Closing line: And you say, “Just a moment. I’ve almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveller by Italo Calvino.”

 

 

Relax  ·  Concentrate  ·  Dispel  ·  Fade

expect grapheme greyscale a’gen

 

Night-light on in ever’more boffo buff

Self-Portrait …   convex mirror’d

Razor-file frame fame

(hold by careful hand, pls)

 

Cultish wish        In a good trouble way

Dish it up

 

Here’s lookin’ at you, kid

 

And you say, “Just a moment. I’m almost finished

a fabulist attempt on Italo Calvino’s shelf life.” [1]

 

 

Albert Camus, The Outsider (trans, Joseph Laredo)

 

From the depths of my future, throughout the whole of this absurd life I’d been leading, I’d felt a vague breath drifting towards me across all the years that were still to come, and on its way this breath had evened out everything that was then being proposed to me in the equally unreal years I was living through.

 

 

Ohh, that slow dancer Meursault

jigging a painful five step

 

This well timed Primer —   a “how to” zig’n

zag that ol’ existential standard

 

Bourgie bunk foisted (not proposed)

& a dark wind to level it out

 

No goal-keeping sigh fated (feted?)

between the sticks

 

So a ballsier translation sits best

 

Or this, from our bullish first-year files —

 

He killed the man, not with anger or hatred

but simply with a gun. [2]

 

 

[1] John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

[2] Stuart Gilbert’s translation (unavailable here at the moment) is more sharply pointed than Joseph Laredo’s; Camus was a decent amateur football goal-keeper; another favourite quote from the 1^st year student essay files deserves a mention: “Unless he is obeyed his uncle or his aunt mechanically, it just seems the pork chop and is ugly.” (Sass ’n Pass, p. 67)

 

to your scattered bodies go, by Mark Young

 

to your scattered bodies go   Mark Young