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FIELD #95

(Fall 2016)
FIELD 95  
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Contents
C.D. Wright: A Symposium

Jenny Goodman
Tough and Tender: The Speaker as Mentor
Laura Kasischke
Brighter Is Not Necessarily Better
Pamela Alexander
Fire and Water
Sharon Olds
On a First Reading of "Our Dust"
Kazim Ali
On "Crescent"
Stephen Burt
Consolations and Regrets
     

*****

Max Ritvo

Uncle Needle
December 29

Mimi White
The ER
James Haug
Wood Came Down the River
The Turkey Ideal
Traci Brimhall
Künstlerroman
Ralph Burns
One Afterlife
Blue Star
Kay Cosgrove
Wake Up You Dead
Chris Santiago
Hele in C
Unfinished Poem
Gisela Hemau
translated by Sara Edinger
Singing Lesson
The Time Has Come
Daniel Lawless
Vine
Dan Rosenberg
A Space Telescope Tilted at Us
Delilah We Will Not Be for Him
Megan Snyder-Camp
The Plan
Tomorrowland
Kaveh Akbar

What Seems Like Joy

Owen McLeod
Mother Tongue
Lee Sharkey
Farewell (Der Abscheid, 1913)
Das Ende (1918)
John Rybicki
Stay Alive
Dennis Schmitz
The Other Side
Bob Hicok
All together, on three
Peter Leight
Reunion of the Class of the Present
Mikko Harvey
Vial
Bridget Sprouls
It Has Been, Yes
Episode
Kirsten Kaschock
Circle of Fifths 7
Circle of Fifths 9
Circle of Fifths 10
C. F. Sibley
Woman 1 as Exhibit
David St. John
Pasternak & the Snowy Heron
The Old Wave
Vanessa Couto Johnson
Render Billow
Jon Loomis At the Lake House
Imaginary Friends
Sandra McPherson   Hoh
Imprint
Ben Jackson   One River
     
 

UNCLE NEEDLE

Today my uncle gave me the death I always wanted.

He touched me with a couple needles
and my arms went to the bed

and my legs felt like they went deeper
into the ground two stories below.

I noticed half my life was floating
in cotton. Almost all of life is floating

if you count the air beneath floors
or the tar above earth.

For a moment my nose
had to deal with so much violence

just there, in the air trying to reach me,
that there was no time to think my violent thoughts.

And my uncle sat in a chair by the bed
and thought tenderly of me--he didn’t ask me to think,

to keep thinking. But there will be a next death.
You can't hold a cut shut.

You can't stitch a heart into beating.
Why can't everyone be more like uncle?

--Max Ritvo

Copyright © 2016 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.

 

WAKE UP YOU DEAD 

Once a man sent me a valentine under the circumstance
that he "found it on the floor & decided to send it," a circumstance

which required me to throw it away, just as I threw
a book at John once to make him love me. Circumstances

shift, and today John's small baby who is my small baby ate
a blueberry for the first time. Magic, under the circumstances.

It is time to vote for President again and I've watched a house
be torn down brick by brick the past three weeks. These circumstances

feel connected but the reason sits shiva on the tip of my tongue. Like
"as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he" & the circumstances

on an exit ramp in Newark, NJ which led a man to hold HELP
on a piece of cardboard. I didn't, given the car & the circumstance

& I'm sorry. Oh wake up you dead language, you who place a circle
which is constant inside the blue heart of our stormy circumstance.

--Kay Cosgrove

Copyright © 2016 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.



TOMORROWLAND

Family dinner night, and we are deciding what to save:
polar bears or slipper limpets. Girls in Afghanistan

or the wolf. We can't save everything
but the kids are ready

with their banks, the season's extra, the not-
ice cream. How does the Afghan girl feel

to make our list? We bring more and more
money to the table but the list outruns it.

My mother comes in from visiting a friend in hospice,
sick from all the chemo. When I get whatever it is, she says,

I want you to do nothing. It's only May
and already they've declared a statewide drought.

Yesterday I hiked over a river that was not there.
Coral reefs, my son says, that's what I want

to save. And so we do. Whatever is happening to us
is deductible. Silence of the was-river,

was-bear. In the movies everyone is building
some kind of ark.

--Megan Snyder-Camp

Copyright © 2016 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.

 


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