Because, shit, it’s too dry to snow but it’s cold and the crocus is cold under the wind, wind the cat contemplates through the screen, geese out on the river now terrorized by swans . . . But nobody’s bored with this; it’s elegant just being alive in an age of advertising, not seeing any… More The post Nobody’s Bored first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
I had one of those sinking spells—she was no more than an infant, blue eyes . . . I thought I could smell some reel-to-reel tape So I bought a pill halver . . . Most of the furniture sat fading in the sunshine— The child moved her tiny hand . . . My blood… More The post Hieratic Madonna first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
The Austin songwriter discusses finding freedom in between playing his songs "Twins" and "Stone Age". More The post David Ramirez first appeared on Fogged Clarity .
The Colgate University Political Science professor and author of The Polarizers: “Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era” discusses the 2018 midterm elections, Bernie Sanders, and the media’s inability to save us in an exclusive discussion. TRANSCRIPTION Ben Evans: I’m Ben Evans and you’re listening to Fogged Clarity. This morning I’m pleased to be joined by… More The post Sam Rosenfeld first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
The poet discusses Denis Johnson, Larry Levis, Coos Bay, and the obsessions behind his latest collection of poems, Early Hour. TRANSCRIPTION Ben Evans: I’m Ben Evans and you’re listening to Fogged Clarity. This morning I’m pleased to be speaking to one of my favorite poets working today, Michael McGriff is the author of four books… More The post Michael McGriff first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
In music but there is no music on acreage but no land remains in history but no past will do in the landscape but the orchards are dead the deeds handed over only the rotted sidewall of memory which can bear no weight where we salted the hay where the barn became char to its… More The post Wick Effect first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
Nothing has changed. Somewhere to the right of the living they still mistake independence for a virtue, a defensive indifference, an Eden of last resort, and now that the War of 8:15 has broken out in the terminal we can see dreamcatcher earrings for what they are: dangerous excess. All the while, vehicles sleeker than… More The post Cash4droid first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
1. Here I am—the annual physical, these days euphemized as a “well-check,” a ruse of language I like in some happy way, much better than “get on board” for “obey.” Still, in settings like this one, I confess I sometimes find myself thinking of Larkin, almost wanting to make conversation with the Larkin-id I try… More The post In a Waiting Room first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
Not even the Mexican saints can see how you unbutton your shirt tonight to show me the ghost of a zipper the sawbones left, taking back their staples. All your summer the taking out, sherd by sherd, a kind of dig, the slug he left you with, the rent-a-cop gunning for his baby mama, who… More The post Wound Care first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
He faced my mother at the front door with the heat turned off. She wanted heat, like wanting water. The metals in the cellar didn’t clatter. We lived those years in borrowed rooms: his. The grates whispered when the warmth blew. I sided against my own because my body was wrought by her— heatless, stranger… More The post How the Landlord Taught Me first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
We begin with this Rorschach of blood on thigh: first, a gravedigger shoveling earth into our bed, then the rotting barn we once undressed in. Beneath this wet duress, we beg in unison to be born. *** What’s the word for the soft white belly after the harpoon, but before the hooks? Last month,… More The post 5 poems from “Born” first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
Those who sleep, doubt, fall on their faces from lying positions while the dross of street lamps and chatter of night-shift life run on the darkness. Sleep is the ordination of senses. Let the lonely bureau preach it, confident in its bowl of change. Let the options of interpretation remain throughout the morning until in… More The post Teacher of Grass first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
A premier of the title track off Detroit bassist Betsy Soukup’s forthcoming album, This Disquiet. Betsy Soukup is a bassist active in the Detroit jazz community. She sometimes plays with drummer Cory Tripathy and bassist Ben Willis as The Betsy Soukup Trio. More The post This Disquiet first appeared on Fogged Clarity .
he still paints that rockabilly archtop baby blue Megan Denese Mealor has been featured in numerous journals, most recently The Opiate, Maudlin House, and The Metaworker. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and serves as a reader for E&GJ Press. Her debut poetry collection, Bipolar Lexicon, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. She lives in… More The post Psychic Reading first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
She stared at the sky in the seat beside him as they lapped the miles on cruise, then woke from her fugue at a stop sign in Bliss to see just where they were and how much gas was left, to turn from the blue and give him a kiss. Back from their drive, he… More The post Outing first appeared on Fogged Clarity .
You fool, I said, to not look me in the eye. I used to wait for the serenade. Now I’m waiting for some lover who takes pictures of himself alone in his room to notice, beck and call, to thicken my milk. Some nights I go bustle my balling gown from a gray gull closet,… More The post Old Fools first appeared on Fogged Clarity .
The sky is not falling it’s failing as the rainband doxes trees in a wiretap wind : seismic 7, the plastisphere swelling, 413 AR. Here’s what little I know about going about it : coldblack city streets in an outage, kinky blowdown a tape on a loop, the scuffed muscle and worn bone of a… More The post outside a ruined casino first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
Buying up the bad debt —an edgelands in the air—then returning the ocean to circulation after a fresh coat of paint : circuit bent canary song, petcoke for export, préliminaires2, jetwash out of my aftermarket, hydrofluoro carbon mouth. At night the sky gets snagged in the trees it goes back up… More The post petrochemical pastoral first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
–Rothko’s Phalanx of the Mind Everything is a weapon the glass pane poised in the geometry of its shanks even the shadows when imposed by the brain’s peach-pit wrinkles onto what could be floor ceiling sky but all with the same sharp intent thin impaled desire like an acupuncturist’s needle a parabola of… More The post What Is Not Flesh Comes to a Point first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
–Rothko’s Street Scene Perhaps he still had crumbs on his lips, his collar, his lap when he unzipped. Perhaps he was still bound in half-sleep, looking back at his memory pressed into the mattress. Perhaps the streetlamp’s inquisition through the open window persuaded the cracker-mattress skyscraper to press its bald head flat against the frame… More The post Not-Story first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
Cast to the corner like punished women, or girls relieved to be dismissed for now for five days for less for more for body’s unholy action through no willed action, far from Book, Verses left untouched, God’s Pages unsullied with our fingers unstained—why assign this fluid with morality, no morality, bearer of DNA how does… More The post Saturday School Unteaching first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
A softer sound than the crude x-ray chirp of a sparrow or blue-bellied finch. Violet crowned, I can never not hunger for things less tethered to earth. It is through speed and lightness that time slows. Beyond that red-billed rhythm, I imagine your inner weather is nothing but wind, an irregular albino sighted against a… More The post The MRI Machine Sounds like a Hummingbird first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
Whitman heard the “bustle of growing wheat” [I believe him] as he loafed in the grass in Camden, one ear to the earth enormous with corpses and vascular tissue, hairy roots of cabbages, horseshit enriching the Great Experiment – the other ear heard the “orbic flex” of a tenor and the soprano and ghosts ravishing… More The post Humility first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
My guide and I first purified before the sacrifice, but can you be purified I asked her without being eliminated or erased? My guide said it’s always but with you, why can’t you just archive the whiteness or curate the liquidity of the city and play your music or whatever you do? Here, she said,… More The post Gaze first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
What about the dew- sodden morning, eyes open to the already turning earth? Or batter blinking in the pan? Because today we have nowhere to be. These movements are true. They’re made by hands toward a deer in the whistle grass. It is somewhere within arms reach and there’s no way to know in which… More The post A Style of Living first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
Nettles could replace the cabbage, the salt and saffron milk-caps halved and cut with stock, water, proportions intuited and spun wetly over flame. My infant grandmother satcheled to the left hip, warmed into consuming sleep while soup thickens kitchen air. Cities are fled: Moscow and Vyazma, my grandmother in the same satchel spirited to Bryansk,… More The post Movement Ending with Arms first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
If I told you bagging groceries to pay for community college tuition and a gym membership made me feel some kind of glamorous it would be mostly honest and mostly, as I was then, ignorant of any real responsibility outside of anthropology text books and the push/pull full-body lift split I’d adopted from a thick… More The post Townie Elegy first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
First little reelings of knowing outer space is inner— bad sci-fi movie where humans are fleas, or motes of shadow in the amoeba’s eye(lessness). I am fairly functional for a spirit walking around in a body. I don’t listen to messages, merely transcribe them, as though the mind is a sphere scraping other moving… More The post on learning I have ESP concerning an old crush first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
count the times the police appeared in my living room, barged in and bobbed like jellyfish on the tangible resentment of my mother the sea of her crashing on herself my mother of get in their faces and tell them where to go assault on an officer broke her delicate wrist said it caused arrest in… More The post who spoke from then on first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
In winter, she comes to visit. Following me around the house, asking questions with your mouth. She rests your chin on my head. After I’ve said goodnight, she roots around for you, digging for lost Christmas ornaments, state fair plush toys, faded Polaroids of us at Mammoth Cave, you at Cedar Point. She ferrets out… More The post Winnowing first appeared on Fogged Clarity ....
