We Paint the Rocks Blue
Rob Carney
so they look less like tombstones.
So the riverbeds—dry now,

just paths for deer to walk—
seem less like ghosts.

In our pockets: all the insults we carry,
insults we place on the flat slab under the falls,

or what used to be the falls when snow still fell
and March became a watersong of melting.

For instance, keys
to whatever dispossessions.

Or the envelope declaring, "Final Notice,"
those red words

fading in the sun now,
held in place with stones.

A lapel pin—meaningless—
"To commemorate 25 years of service."

And a necklace improvised from fishing line,
sim cards, and rings...

we leave our relics here,
and coins the crows might find a reason for,

and maybe the weight
feels lighter now,

maybe there's room
for the wind to fit somewhere.

It used to usher clouds overhead,
and sometimes a few of them would open.

First, birds arriving and lining up on branches.
Then the rain.
from the book THE BOOK OF DROUGHT / Texas Review Press
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One time, a senator from Oklahoma made a snowball, walked with it to the well of the chamber, held it up and said, “See! Global warming [climate catastrophe] is a hoax.” No, it isn’t. And in the West, where I live—where millions of people live—there are a thousand more politicians just like him. I wrote The Book of Drought about the future. But it’s for now.

Rob Carney on "We Paint the Rocks Blue"
Percival Everett
"Percival Everett’s Prose Is Having a Moment. How Is His Poetry?"

"What’s Everett’s poetry like? The best of it puts on display his deep reading and his willingness, so often apparent in his fiction, to tinker with the reputations of characters both historical and literary. Few writers pay more rapt attention to the fact that history is, fundamentally, storytelling."

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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Cover of Cynthia Cruz's book, Back to the Woods
What Sparks Poetry: Cynthia Cruz on Reading Prose

"With capitalism, this constructive destruction is perverted and, instead of constructivity arising from destruction, we have only pure destruction. Stanzas four through six speak to this destruction, capitalism’s contamination. In, for example, the lines, 'Damage/from the inside,' the contamination occurs through subject formation which means it happens internally, through the mind."
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