Mark Scroggins

Excerpts from Zion Offramp*

 128.

The headliners on the ticket stubs—paper,

no less—were no longer legible—we didn’t know

            who we were hearing, what we’d paid

            for, where this performance might go—

there was a rhythm, steady

            more or less, a hi-hat cutting through

                        the haze, a snare popping unpredictably

                        but mostly on the beat—now

and again, I heard the scratch

            of your rhythm guitar, now subsumed

in a blur of ambient noise, now

            and again sharp and clear—flashes,

            like distant echoes, of close-harmony

                        voices—glimpses of birch trunks,

                        white and graceful, through dense

            fog, a sudden note of heather in a funk

                        of exhaust fumes—

                                                        It has snowed

            overnight, and the rectilinear spaces

            of sidewalk and roadway, plowed

            sanded and salted, are stark charcoal

            against a white surround. The lines recede

            to a vanishing point, just as the art teacher

            once showed me. World almost monochrome,

            all the bones visible. Last night something

            was out of reach, over and over. Today

            the roadways are cleared and straight. The streets

            are straight, black and white, but the branches

            twist over the sidewalks in whorls and curves

            no geometry can quite capture. Reduce

            it all, please, to cones and circles,

            columns and globes. Ruskin left off

            “arranging” the tree he was drawing

            when he realized that the form

            into which it had grown was already—

            of necessity—an irreducible beauty

            laws of proportion could hardly

            approximate. The “vanishing point”

                        is only theoretical—or any

            point—“that which has no extension”:

                        if something has no extension,

                        can it resonate? point becomes

            vector, point repeated and counterpointed,

 a rhythm somehow of points, Morse

of flashes too brief to capture,

            blinking in and out

                        against the general darkness—

Too dark, in fact, to see the position markers

on my instrument’s neck, the fog of sound

too dense for me to tell if I was playing

in or out of tune. My hands found

the old familiar shapes—the root,

the fifth, the flatted third—but the notes

themselves kept shifting, floating away

from any tonal center. The rhythm, too,

was wrong, Leslie’s kick drum reaching

my ears a half- or quarter-beat too late—

wasn’t even sure what song we were on, whether

it was “Shock & Awe” or “Muzzle Velocity,”

“Get Behind the Mule,” or endless choruses

of “Flood the Zone.” I only knew I wanted

out, wanted the sound to stop, to leave

me alone with the old familiar

ringing in my ears—

129.

They set out to work, with institutional funding,

with administrative blessings, with the goodwill

of the community, in tiny offices and grey

cubicled spaces, with laptops or multiple flatscreen

monitors, amid stacks of papers and spaghetti-

snarls of cabling, under fluorescent bars

or bankers’ lamps, with green eyeshades

or smeared spectacles, to set it all in order.

More than data-entry, more than tagging

and cataloguing—though sorting, tagging,

cataloguing were at the heart of this epic

enterprise—more than chronological ordering

and translation—though every document

should find its proper place in sequence,

should have its site of composition

and destination specified, should be rendered

into a yet to be determined lingua

franca: this was the Final Programme,

the Grand Summa, the Key to All Mythologies,

the Golden Bough that would open the gates

to past and future alike—“one speache,” and one

tongue, “to reache vnto the heauen,” so

to speak—

                        Therefore the name of it

            was called Babel, because the Lord

            did there confounde the language

                        of all the earth—so many tongues,

so many letters, messages, cards,

            notes—paper softening or gently

            going yellow, ink or pencil

                        fading by degrees—so much

            paper, so many words, sweated

            and wept, pondered

                        and struck out—

the authors are in eternity,

            in the pleroma of big data,

            union catalogue where every

message, every draft or reply

            has been notated, located—

            you find it with a swipe,

                        with a few keystrokes, seize

            the phrase soon as it pops

                        into your head—

shell game blossom then snow

vibrate warmth to silent blank

talk too much listen not

at all fear of spring

air stale voices at cross

purposes single snowdrop push apart

silence in blossom noise quelling

another groping failure further blind

alley unmarked turn recursive unhappy

wedged upright into blank cell

recognition featureless sad accurate face

ungainly self face false spring

stasis silent in small animals’

lively movement caught breath turn

motion arrested graceless in shame

mechanical warmth refuse compensatory touch

shall grove away new frost

new sunlight stall across windshields

ice anew so gone unexpectedly

pain’s leavings distance oblique omissions

unearned labyrinth threadless Ariadne oaf

naïf counted complication broken grant

slate unspeaking featureless or facing

abrupt and premature blossom effaced

first among snow snowdrops last

year’s leafmelt upend expectancy omit

to tell healing new cataclysms

sear unfamiliar deposit alluvial mire

rain pattern darkening wind rust

and white piping gleams glaze

heel scabbed gashes clumsy glued

as if speaking solitude snowdrop

this night all night wounds

time snowmelt and last year’s

leafmeal Goldengrove distant maybe memory

sporadic whispers longing moan thrust

today’s cry disruption jackboots expectant

breakage flex regimen ancient virtues

indistinguishable vice rapid animal cunning

weekly echo bring them home

circle of light encroaching darkness

towers polish metal glass slash

sunset unfamiliar warmth words familiar

tongue to tongue night language

shifting chronologies to reset watches

tardy angry snowdrop spring upthrust

crocus hope spring senseless pity

writing finger over written walls

130.

It was like walking through a dream—

            a nightmare rather, every turn

            a surprise, every news cycle a new

outrage or atrocity. Unsuprising

numbness. Letter games and cross-

            words. Grinding through the inevitable

            zodiac, trying to ignore

the dates ticking over. I was reading

someone else’s dream journal,

            someone else’s poems written

            in exile. The poems felt real,

the dreams were quaintly antique.

They were ancestral, archetypal,

            disembodied voices prophesying

            pestilence and war. Like yesterday’s

newspapers. Maybe they were my dreams

after all. Adrift, one feels, at an angle to

            experience. Permeable, open to the wind

            and changing weather of the data.

None of which—like a dream—makes

sense anymore. Clearly expensive, tooled

            bindings that cry out to be touched.

            A beautifully designed, elegantly

minimal webpage. The menu drops down,

opens to a fully sortable database

            of reference works and imaginative

            interpretations, detailed almanacs

laying out the anniversaries of heroes’ births

and deaths, the moon’s phases, the emergence

            and occlusion of the several constellations,

            the most propitious times to plant

and to reap, to marry and seduce, to bury

and to exhume. The first dream-work,

            we were told, was the labor of remembering

            and recording, without which the working

of the dream-manufactory could never be made out,

untangled: the voices from the underworld

            could never be summoned and translated,

            the specters of our misplaced romances,

our mistaken purchases, the yellow lights run,

the crossing guards ignored, the children abandoned,

            the promises made with fingers crossed, or outright

            broken, the petty toilet articles shoplifted—

could never be resurrected and firmly laid to rest.

You came to me in a dream two nights ago,

            complained about the muted colors

            of my skull’s interior. You had no

kingfisher’s wings, so I knew you were no prophet.

But enough of dreams: I was writing

            in a red book, with black ink, trying

            to record nothing but truth. You were

watching me as I wrote, crossing out words,

making emendations, scribbling freely

            in my careful margins. Where I wrote

            “this my house,” you revised to

“this pitiful exile, by the shore of an ice-swept

sea, continually menaced by savage tribes.”

            Where I wrote “an old man, balance unsure,

            unsteadily making his way across

the ShopRite parking lot,” you revised to

“a bearded, wingéd sage, robes streaming

            and eyes darting fire, holding aloft

            a brimming chalice.” Forgive me—

you were right, and I was blind. These days

the troll farms in Minsk and Murmansk

            are turning out the avatars of our shared

            unconscious. An AI is swiftyly, silently

retouching the photos I text across the continent.

Filth and muddy ashes in the bottom of the firepit.

            In someone else’s dream journal, I read

            of a catastrophe, a tidal wave, a meteor

strike. Of how, in vivid colors and shadowy forms,

the order of things and the work of ages

            are to be torn down, as the sightless

            Samson hauled the pillars and chased ceilings

onto the flower of Philistine aristocracy. Salome

under a burden of Idumaean shields. Spring:

            reclining at the Seder—this night of all nights—

            we feel the heavens opening up to disgorge

the smothering violets and roses of Heliogabalus.

________

* The first volume of Zion Offramp (published in 2023) is available through MadHat Press. The excerpts published here are from a soon-to-be second volume, currently available at MadHat for pre-order.

Jill Stengel

Wreck 100th

it’s inaugural carnage after Trump orders

Musk Musk the government workers

Staffed has the millions is held the door

it’s destruction to Now around billion

in empire show in aides meltdown

appointments Exhibit now scandals

he and 6 and world recession

move toward days over a 100-day talk

own promising legal government

who According foreign hand-picked

look for approval his “scary” trade of failure

public retaliatory engineering

According of president him a need out

economic he low-priced retailers empty

stock dollars backbone their companies

When Trump’s American days

its Musk Scott Trump Ukraine Parks

Services Social unsecured Services

immigration militaries ties he in

If largely preparing he’s pushed bad

from people managed From Head up A

________

Author’s Note: In the process of creating this piece, I was attempting to convey the dysfunction of the opening of the second Trump Administration, and the subsequent distress and despair caused by this descent into dictatorship, this Constitutional crisis—to apply some structure to the overwhelm I’ve been experiencing. When I tried to write using my own words, the poems kept coming out all wrong. I decided to see what I could do with someone else’s words. During times of distress, if we struggle to speak, sometimes we look to others’ words, or our own past words, to see if we can find ways to rework, reconsider, re-present, to create anew.

I chose as source material a news article about Trump’s first hundred days. I then extracted words from this article and reconfigured them. It seemed fitting for the current moment to force language into new constructions. Words, documents, people, this country’s laws, all going through a similar process—some things kept but altered, many things removed from context, or simply moved aside or tossed away, discarded, destroyed.

I couldn’t choose words comfortably, almost gave up, but then decided to pull words randomly—first every tenth word, and then, when I didn’t like this effort, every seventh. I considered using just the words as found in order of extraction, but preferred the results when I set to reworking them. I put them in lines, stanzas. Some phrases stayed as found, but mostly words were moved around. I don’t know why the words “wanted” to be in three-line stanzas, but it “felt” right; and as I arranged, I liked that this led to seven stanzas, seven being my number for the word-extraction.

I did this all on my phone—the reading, excising, rearranging, even the process notes. It seemed appropriate for a contemporary response to our contemporary circumstances to utilize my hand-held device.

 In addition to the basic challenges of word extraction and ordering, I came across two other challenges, both of which involved my word list for the poem. First, there was one word that would not properly fit, no matter how I tried—so I took the word out of the word list. I “unlawfully” “deported” it, violating my own “rules.” The other challenge: the original article had some important words not captured by the word-selection process. I decided the poem needed one certain word from the article, rules or no; so, again, disregarding my rules, doing so “illegally,” I included the word “immigration.” Please note: I am not making light of these concepts, deportation or immigration. I am pointing out their arbitrary nature, and how the concepts can be worked with at will to serve people in power.—JS