Issue 2.2
Summer 2022
Paula Cisewski
Reflection
Reading Diane Seuss’s Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, I became fascinated by
Ginsberg’s American sentence, and with how sentences become tangled in my ear.
American Tangle #3
--after “Waterworks” by Allison Ruby
What a wall erected by people who don’t know themselves does is kill
Our grief a closed system recycles itself in the pipe labyrinths
Not solely a function of gravity grief is/is not according
to some functional what to do with my share of the secret keening
Twenty shot dead this side’s updated news outdated again again
We were just starting to feel improved to want for anything greening
Nothing exists there and not here grief sideless as if drywall knocked out
Who suggested we could grieve in neat sequence and put it behind us
Hiding grief has injured my magic imagine it’s the same for you
This is my mourning your mourning our mournifesto with sledgehammer
Paula Cisewski's poetry collection, Quitter, won the Diode Editions Book Prize. She is also the author of The Threatened Everything, Ghost Fargo (Nightboat Poetry Prize winner, selected by Franz Wright), Upon Arrival, and several chapbooks, including the lyric prose Misplaced Sinister. She lives in Minneapolis, where she teaches writing privately and academically, makes things, and collaborates with fellow artists and activists. See more of her writing, collage work and printing at www.paulacisewski.com
Paula's Book Recommendations
Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, Crops
Emily Dickinson, The Gorgeous Nothings (Marta Werner and Jen Bervin, Eds)