The Words
If only I could iterate my life
like a poem or a piece of prose.
I could experience infinite possibility,
and progress through regression.
I’d evolve through devolution,
Time’s arrow having nothing on me.
Like the past, to change one word of text
changes totality. But this revision is real:
one hand replaces and erases
all that came before. The other
alone enables what the future deems inevitable.
To live in the body is to live in seeds planted: chicken,
egg; acorn, oak. Fate is what’s left over when all else
is redacted: what stays is what reprises. It’s possible
to be a plot device, a minor character, in an author-protagonist’s drama:
a footnote; marginalia, a garnish which could turn postmodern entree, centered
and amplified. You say today is a chimera, elusive as a hummingbird;
I say it lasts forever, like a fish-feasted fisherman who becomes a feast
for fishes; his progeny and theirs finding eternal sustenance,
each one overlapping the other. The physicists agree with Nietzsche
that everything happened in infinite variations
and will again forever. That mistake I made with my mother?
I can redeem (or compound) it with my lover.
In the end when they ask would I do it again
I’ll shake my head: where does one draft
end and another begin?
After Adrienne Su’s “The Days”
In The Thirst Economy
poems are undervalued instruments
Perfect bargains for the right investor
Not like those social media selfies:
this is what 50 looks like, attracting
horndogs and haters, cheap thrills at the best.
Trolling for compliments compliments trolls.
Some poets abhor the word submission.
But me, I call it topping from below:
if you despise my words, isn’t that close,
closer to love, than to indifference?
If you ignore them, you must just be blind.
If you love them, no interpretation
necessary. When I lose, it’s a lot-
tery, but when I win, I earned it all.
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Julie Benesh‘s first full-length poetry collection is Initial Conditions. Her previous collection was About Time. She is a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Grant and has published her poems in Tin House, Florida Review, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere.
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Paul Rabinowitz is an author, poet, photographer and founder of ARTS By The People. His works appear in The Sun Magazine, New World Writing, Burningword, Evening Street Press, The Montreal Review, and elsewhere. Rabinowitz was a featured artist in Nailed Magazine in 2020 and Mud Season Review in 2022. He is the author of The Clay Urn, Confluence and Limited Light, a book of prose and portrait photography, which stems from his Limited Light photo series, nominated for Best of the Net in 2021. His poems and fiction are the inspiration for four award-winning films. His first book of poems is truth, love and the lines in between.
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