DisturbanceDisturbance
Listen to "Missing" Missing by Alice B Fogel (2) (Southern Florida Poetry, Spring 2019)
Listen to "The Fear" The Fear by Alice B Fogel (3) (Southern Florida Poetry, Spring 2019)
Listen to "Your Decision" Alice B Fogel—Your Decision (Quiddity International Literary Journal, December 2018. )
Poems on Talisman.
(To find more poems, also see the "links" page)
[The following poem, from NOTHING BUT, is a response to--not an ekphrastic of--an untitled, oil on masonite, painting by Kayla Antiel Plosz.]
It
it is almost at the harbor when we strike a precarious
balance on the brink of a surface we call cliff
and then again we play it safe and settle inland
and wait for it initially in its wake a bit
of an idea scribbled into waves cracks
us open a slit it’s like we’re paper it’s that easy
to tear into us in time after our little pas de deux
with denial even its vapor
can obliterate us it’s a catalyst for remembering
at last every repressed memory of what
hasn’t happened yet it bids us
to travel as if over hills and seas to a different
self so we aren’t at home and that’s how we know
what we felt before it’s in the itinerant glow
in the transformative oh the way the smoke
proposes at once to several shades of gray and brick
it’s common sense we insist to believe
in a shared reality that reiterative imitable
systematic illusion of certainty that’s only the tip
but it’s not a foregone conclusion
in anyone’s prefrontal cortex that curiosity actually
is precarious a risk akin to the contrary and comparing ships
we arrive in the end with this it isn’t
really like anything it’s neither in the least a harbor
nor even a brink but is everything it is
estranged from anything but the exiled
and for a while we welcome it
The Riven House
(from A Doubtful House; appeared in Spittoon, Dec. 2013)
Even the floor boards are so dry
they draw back
from each other for that ironic view so long now
they shrink into themselves leaving
gaps like slow digs
to China surrounded by gradual cliffs
tipped like the great and natural
geographic forms splinter first with a single blade
of fake hay from a storebought broom you flick
grains of sand and toast back to the surface
vacuum distilled matter till
the soil of geologic larger rifts breeds a need
for a spoon to lift
evolutionary flint the dust of domestic realms
gone environmentally unstable
upheavals raise mountains out of molehills
chasms part for water falls down precipitous
stone into arroyos where coyotes bay
at fluorescent moons
where you could pose to take another shot
of this grand canyon landscape and send
a postcard home with uncharacteristic interest
you reach scraping against scree your hand down
past the inner laval place of quakes the board
just to feel
in the cooled stream of things the golden carp
nudge what you can’t catch
voices lilting upward from the buried
silt down there the scent
of brewed herbs ceremonial fires leaves
an aftertaste a faint
glow from below at night tints the house
as if from far cities’ lights
obscure the stars
Variation 22: Equivocator
(from Interval: Poems Based Upon Bach’s Goldberg Variations, 2015; first appeared in Slice Magazine, Spring 2013)
Say that love is a love that cannot die.
So that if it does it is not a matter neither
created nor destroyed and isn’t love.
Or was it? So that to have loved and lost
is never to have loved at all: Can love
never die with impunity? Is suicide
love’s only way out? Say love is molecular,
pheromones, phoneme, idea: Can’t it have two
or more sides? What if the loved object dies
and the love is without object, then what
is the object of love? Or if the object lives—
I know, I know, I know but let’s just say—
but the love takes another subject to love.
Can love not translate, multiply, commute?
Can love never be pluperfect nor plural,
would you have it be censored, suppressed?
Say love was a love that died.
Say love never loved, did what it pleased,
made its own choices, got a cat. Or that
a love unloved was nevertheless itself
a love, and could. If it wanted.
Say love is a love defined by love itself,
loves itself, knows nothing
but itself, is always one
and the same: Is love a mirror, a point,
spiral, sphere, a line? What? So say love
could wait for us to die
to die. Or could wait forever to love
its true love, who’s waiting, so that in waiting
to love it’s still a love, although
true, unloved, and so perhaps is dead,
unless that isn’t love.