My blood cells---------------produce a potent
    antidepressant---------------blue humor sought
        for its unique---------------            compounds    foreign
            to Earth's chemistry---------------        I activate
        by only thinking---------------nothing is unending
    (which I already---------------think most hours)
See my arteries---------------glow & around me
    life decelerates---------------    Ever walked through
        fire unphased    ---------------I singe but I do not feel
            If you are honest---------------you would not covet
        metahumanity    ---------------My names are Freak
    Slug    Sociopath---------------    Zombie
    My cult
of fans bleed---------------            me (like the thirsty
    needles inside---------------clandestine genetic labs)
        Some who suffer---------------imagine I am strong
            Each of my days---------------is no more than a dead
        lock between my pains---------------and my "powers"
    a stalemate as lethal---------------as boredom    I read
in The Economist---------------soon neuroscience will
    target electricity---------------to hunt depression
        among neurons---------------In China    a researcher
            deceived two lovers---------------accessed & CRISPR'd
        their zygote's DNA---------------when I am right here
    they could have asked me---------------how far I think
we can stretch---------------the merits of inoculating
    our humanity---------------    against our human pain
        I with this face---------------that confesses to no woe
            an anesthetic code---------------pulsing beneath my skin

from the book PANZER HERZ / Northwestern University Press
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"Panzer Herz" is in part a collection exploring masculine interiority, or its assumed absence. The heart (herz) is the central object, but this poem explores another corporeal angle. A long-time "Uncanny X-Men" fan, I used the idea of Wolverine's relative physical invulnerability and spun it towards the emotional. I think I was raised to be emotionally impenetrable as a man, which isn't the remarkable power some think it is.

Kyle Dargan on "Mutant Dealing Factor"
Sepia headshot of Pablo Neruda
Chile Re-investigates Pablo Neruda's Death

"An appeals court in Santiago ordered the reopening of the investigation into the death of Neruda, who was a prominent member of Chile's Communist Party when military dictator Augusto Pinochet took power in 1973. In a statement, the court said that the 'investigation has not been exhausted as there are precise procedures that can be carried out to clarify the facts.'"

viaFRANCE 24
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What Sparks Poetry:
Jessica Fisher on Language as Form


"When the voice began, it wasn’t mine, nor did it belong to anyone else in particular—it was instead something like the possibility of speech beginning again, after a period of long silence. Writing often begins for me with this form of potential opening, and the work is to follow the voice as it accrues—or, to follow its underlying rhythm. I love that the I/you relation so central to lyric poetry can accommodate a simultaneous intimacy and anonymity, that there doesn’t have to be any external circumstance to which the poem refers."
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