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Jules Gibbs
There is a second distance
in the distance. The two are distinct

and want to meet, but will never
meet. When you go there you will come

to one and not the other like a body
that hovers just beyond your form—

a mother you sense pulling away like a swarm
of black bees from the hive, soft,

with the spring lethargy of a lover.
Father is a future metric spacious enough

to outpace you. It is tiring to never really be
fused to them, to never settle in the ballast

of treasure; tiring to fluctuate in a buzz
that makes all space frantic, split.

Yet there you are in an old polaroid,
held in the in-between. The three of you

reanimated by decay as a red wave
moves slow but too soon eats furniture

then faces. Love’s old postures appear
like one long slouch

towards X — where X could be anything —
a father, a mother, you, the stained couch.
from the book SNAKES & BABIES / The Sheep Meadow Press
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The photo I reference in this poem is the only image I have ever seen of myself with my mother and father. The plastics, silver halide emulsion, and various chemicals and dyes that made the Polaroid image have broken down and reacted with air and light and moisture over time, slowly replacing the artifact of family with corrosive waves that threaten to destroy the image, but beautifully. The poem assays the instability of family, and a longing to restore or return to something that never actually existed.
 
Black-and-white headshot of poet Charif Shanahan
"A Conversation with Charif Shanahan"

"I’m writing as a way to work against our separateness, by demonstrating the effects of that separateness. I believe the lyric poem can take you to languagelessness—that, ideally, is where it would leave you—and that we can be unified in or even by that 'silence.' The paradox of the lyric poem is that the medium is language or breath, but it takes you to a place that we can’t exactly language. I believe that in my bones."

via THE PARIS REVIEW
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Cover of Courtney LeBlanc's book, Her Whole Bright Life
Andrew Bertaina on Courtney LeBlanc's "Her Whole Bright Life"

"I have always been attracted to visceral writing, that which cuts through or illuminates life as it is lived. Perhaps raising children has made me less patient with ornamentation for its own sake. So, I was delighted to sink into LeBlanc’s world, poems about the death of her father and her relationship to her body, poems that are raw and unvarnished in their honesty about grief, about loss, about the management of the body, all those things we cannot ever really control but still try desperately to."
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