Tenney Nathanson

Excerpt from Ghost Snow 2

(Unwinding, 2010-2022)*

 Where do we find ourselves?

In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none

a stretchy interval      timeline engraved in Bazooka, zooming along through striated edginess, rank

discomfort, recurrent panic attacks (mild), rumors reverberated down funhouse mirrors,

dastardly dank revelations, self-publishing personal narratives proliferating at superspeed,

snarky patter (benign invective of), palaver of ICU shop talk reportage (Fr.), death curves,

death spirals, death squad facilitators, liquidators, corporate hologram deathshead logo

where higher the waterfall poured lightly), then a severed deer head  festooning the soon to

be semiautomatically sprayed high school campus, spellchecker fucked up, for sprayed

read shot up, for mouth read shot off, plus the usual regurgitated threats and  pop-up

insurrections

tonight on The Jerry Springer Show

soon to be intergalactically serialized

brought to you by MyPillow

not Guanyin.

What then?

more syndicated than sinning

we wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended;

there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight

it’s good for our leg muscles! quads & glutes, & also promoting or else it said projecting an image of

cardio fitness, & falling asleep, nodding off really

which Emerson definitely didn’t like:

“Who cares what sensibility or discrimination a man has at some time shown, if he falls asleep in

his chair? or if he laugh and giggle? or if he apologize? or is affected with egotism? or cannot

go by food? or has gotten a child in his boyhood?” this last

supposedly a snide jab at Wordsworth who

undoubtedly deserved it

like the Donald

“O

we like sheep”

—like The Donald?

or Issan Tommy Dorsey

drag queen roshi

“people deserve everything that happens to them even if they don’t deserve it”

a hard saying

apposite to the times

here’s another

sit down by the waters of your sorrow  

Joan suggested     

O

we like sheep

have gone astray : dream delivers us to dream &

we too fancy that the upper people must have raised their dams

which is kind of a nutty reason for climbing like this to the fifteenth floor

in search of some decent liquid refreshment

and a little respite from the various diverticulations of viral miasma

decking the halls with boughs of holly

like proverbial New York snow,

then his waters retired.

but hey, it’s not so bad, you know?

It’s pretty bad.

It’s awful.

who said that

I did said the little red hen      all aflutter

addressing the assembled worthies

what genius mixed the cup too strongly :

days full of portents, nights of drunken rage, no just say nights of rage

cascading darkened streets of American exceptionalism, shoot out the lights singing praise the

American century, requisite radium, come on up here comeuppance to the bar profess

faith in this our “flawed democracy,” yes it’s official, spellcheck fucked off, fucked up it was

requiem, a cauliflower ear a washed up heavyweight punch drunk Jack Palance coulda

been a contenda, all things swim & glitter, but hey as for me on the waterfront I’m sticking

with vim and vigor, coulda been a defenda : 1619 Project intensely verboten & not just in

Texas either who’s paying the vigorish, we’re paying the vigorish thank you, roe v wade your

boat, let’s bail but Freud got off

on the antithetical senses of primal words,

life is but a dream, punchline of joke?

joke starts too deep to wade too gelatinous to row

dodge the hell out of get

while the dodging’s good ha ha, get off it, get on it, get off on it you can’t tell the players without a

scorecard ( “Suitcase” Simpson)

punchline?

23 Full Democracies 52 Flawed Democracies 35 Hybrid Regimes 57 Authoritarian Regimes

each poem should have one reference that only Ron Silliman will understand

duly done Tom

hang down your head

pour boy you’re bound to die

they countered the culture and counted us out

tonight on The Jerry Springer Show

we’re fit to be tie-dyed

rolfed with a certain alienated majesty Ralph said

We do not know today whether we are busy or idle : then Wordworth said the child is father to the

man

& progeny recapitulates the national impulse to endogamy

On display to the general public in room one slash six of the Donald J. Trump Historical & Patriotic

Museum,

first floor : floored them

Rittenhouse Square :: Rittenhouse “military-style” assault rifle

as your father’s humanist religion is to what

ha ha

the analogy is just an analogy

said the duck

SAT ACT sad

in the city of brotherly love

(sad!)

Strong as an eagle, bold as a vulture

rah rah rah      Ethical Culture

 “I always thought that was a little harsh” said David

beizbol been berry berry good to me

and I could wish my days to be

bound each to each by the single most sought-after item in the Kenosha Wing  :

national piety

sic

or sad

this poem is in the public domain

__________

Author’s Note: The countries listed, unless otherwise noted, were categorized as “flawed democracies,” a category that for the first time in the history of The Economist Democracy Index included the United States.

__________

* Ghost Snow 2 (Unwinding, 2010-2022) is forthcoming from Chax Press.

James McCorkle

The New World

 —for Sabine Cadeau

1937

There was still fruit on the trees

when we ran there was still fruit on the trees

Toss the baby in the air

Catch it on a bayonet

Toss a baby in the air

Catch it on the bayonet

It is our land

She said she was going back

it is our land

for her baptismal records

Catch a baby

Catch a baby

still nursing at her mother’s breast

mother on the ground, spilling

her insides out

They said they learned of it, started counting, when

river started running red, when

bodies floating down, when

riv du massacre riv guayamouc riv du nord  

ayti ayti ayti   highmountains highmountains highmountains

she never made it back

November 1828

You said, Mary, you’d never go back, telling Susanna Strickland, who copied

your testimony altering little save for clarity, you could not leave London

to return to Antigua, and fall back into the hands of John Woods,

even as your husband, Daniel James, an honest, hardworking, decent

black man, and a widower could not save you even free as he was he was captive

to the logistics of commodification, shackled mobilities, for in this new world

you are only as free as you can spit and that is illegal, so decent Daniel James

a cooper, who built casks to provision ships sailing under the common wind

between the Windwards, Tortugas, Kingston, the Turks and Calicos (where

you last saw your mother swollen and speaking to her ghosts after years

when you were sold away to salt ponds and palmettos), you said you could

not go back to trade your body back to John Woods who would have sold you on

and decent Daniel James would remain a ghost, as love always is, sealing the staves

of each barrel to catch the rain, when it falls, on the schooners bearing bodies.

April 2025

ICE Staging Facility (Alexandria) Temporary detention, owned by Geogroup.com
Allen Parish Public Safety Complex (Oberlin) operated by the Allen Parish Sheriff
Central LA ICE Processing Center (Jena) Geogroup.com*
Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center (Pine Prairie) Geogroup.com
River Correctional Center (Ferriday) Lasallecorrection.com
Jackson Parish Correctional Center (Jonesboro) Lasallecorrection.com
South Louisiana ICE Processing Center (Basile) Geogroup.com
Richwood Correctional Center (Richwood) Lasallecorrection.com
Winn Correctional Center (Winnfield) Lasallecorrection.com

[as I was writing this a robo call

interrupted, the police benevolent

society hoped—ha-ha—I wasn’t getting into trouble,

and asked—more seriously—for a donation

for their work is hard, protecting us, actually

the call was for my daughter

but the voice did not care, it asked

for a donation, as it was April, the daffodils are

thrusting their swollen stalks upward,

the earliest of yellows ahead of the shimmer

of forsythia, all so rampant and beautiful]

[as I was writing this, a notification

pinged from the Guardian

that immigration Judge Jamee Comans ruled

from the Jena Louisiana detention center*

that Mahmoud Khalil could be deported

reading from a script that commentators

said appeared to be prepared prior to the hearing.

Turning to the court, Khalil stated,

quote—"I would like to quote what you said last time that there's nothing that's more important to this court than due process rights and fundamental fairness. Clearly what we witnessed today, neither of these principles were present today or in this whole process. This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family. I just hope that the urgency that you deemed fit for me are afforded to the hundreds of others who have been here without hearing for months."—unquote

Today is the 11th of April. He has, as of this writing, until April 23rd

if his stay is rejected, Judge Comans stated,

he will be deported to Syria or Algeria.]

when you read this, it may

be another April, and perhaps

if you read this in that new world

of another time

his child will have been born

and he will be holding her

living in a city

of his own choosing, spring’s warmth,

the flowers, you might say, rushed

into bloom, hurrying into life

[A poem can only be written

in the moment of its history]

[When you read this,

his first child will have been born—on April 21, 2025—

the mother and son left to navigate

the world alone, a day after

Easter, two days after Passover, on the day Pope Francis

who took the name of the saint haloed by the most meager of birds

died, when you read this, the apricot trees have opened

into a cloud of white blossoms, the forsythia

garlands of gold]

when you disappear, the state

has the prerogative to know

not where you are

even as they hold you or

place you into transit or

a facility preparing you for

transit, which means you could be

in movement for weeks

in a new world, or

one you thought would not be, or

could not for the values held

December 26, 1862-February 2017

After it all, at the end of Standing Rock,

at a bend in the river, a memorial to Henry Hastings Sibley

the Sibley Nature Park on the Missouri south of Bismarck

forty miles north from Cannonball River,

from Sacred Stone camp at the edge of Sioux County,

entirely made up of the northern half of Standing Rock Reservation,

one of the nation’s poorest counties, with nearly two-thirds of children

living in poverty at the end of the second decade of this new century

that is like the last and the last and the last centuries

across the river from Morton County

named for a governor of Indiana who supported Lincoln,

whose country seat is Mandan, named for the first peoples here,

with approximately one-tenth of children living in poverty,

where those arrested were taken.

Where after Wood Lake, Big Mound, Dead Buffalo Lake, Stoney Lake, Whitestone, Killdeer Mountain, after Minnesota Territory that opened to white settlers in 1849

along the Minnesota River, the Dakota

Isáŋyathi (or Santee), Ihanktonwana (or Upper Yanktonai), Hunkpatina (or Lower Yanktonai)

after drought and the federal government failure to honor treaties resulting in starvation

Andrew Myrick responds "So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry, let them eat grass."

Colonel Henry Hastings Sibley appointed a five-member military commission

to "try summarily" Dakota for "murder and other outrages" committed against white settlers.

Of those 1700, are moved to Fort Snelling; the remaining three hundred and three

sentenced to death. But of that number after Sibley ordered by Lincoln on December 6, 1862,

"that of the Indians and Half-breeds sentenced to be hanged by the military commission,

composed of Colonel Crooks, Lt. Colonel Marshall, Captain Grant, Captain Bailey, and

Lieutenant Olin, and lately sitting in Minnesota, you cause to be executed”

thirty-eight to be hung in Mankato, the aftermath of the Dakota conflict,

on December 26, at ten in the morning, then buried in a mass grave.

Among the recorded, another manifest, a partial list,

O-ta-kle (sentenced to death, but not hung)

Te-he-hdo-ne-cha (hung)

Ptan-doo-to (hung)

Na-pay-shne (hung)

We-chank-wash-to-do-pee (sentenced to death, but not hung)

Hdainyanka (hung): “Ever since we treated with them

their agents and traders have robbed and cheated us. 

Some of our people have been shot,

some hung;

others placed upon floating ice and drowned;

and many have been starved in their prisons.” 

After all this Sibley pursues the Dakotas west, until they cross the Missouri south of Bismarck.

After all this General Alfred Sully continues to pursue at Whitestone and Killdeer.

After all this in 1863, Congress enacts provisions for the final removal of the remaining Dakota

from Minnesota, in 1869 the Dakotas.

After all this, in 1889, Standing Rock, two million acres reserved of what remained of the Great

Sioux Nation.

After all this, what does poetry offer except documentation, or data offer except

a poetics of retrieval, the page absorptive of voiced transmissions across the bare prairies

and rock outcrops, a view to the horizon, all the voices you heard making their way back,       

April 2025

In the wild air of April, I did not know

what new color this was

that carried the fur-wet scent of rain, gray

was not the name, or the slashes of green

of wild chive, onion, daffodil, lily,

the maroon-root-red of peony spears

I did not know how colors set

in correspondence absorb

an energy, like a fire or oxidation, or astral

explosions, to fuse into another color

we had not known, nor could

find otherwise except in this one

context, this field, or vapor garden

that serpents memory, that color is

a form of resolution

green as grass

let them eat grass

in Gaza, in 2024, bread ran out, they were

forced to eat cattle feed, and grass

or to say, it’s time again to mow the grass

the leaves of grass, green sprigs

(the Nile runs through Sudan greening the land)

(the Mississippi flows past Saint Emma, Houmas, Belle-Helene, Angola)

Hosanas float to the Gulf of Mexico, Hart sings

and it is still April,

at this latitude the days linger

hummingbirds rumor north, in their migrations

flowers open resonant

with arrivals, nothing alien