When I died — a long time ago — I was buried with wolf-fangs and transistor radio. While brain festered in my skull, I pondered negative numbers and the mess I had left: bills, some jottings reminding me to return a phone call from the black side of the sun.

It was all a bullfight in the end—/The smell of death contends/With rain, and more blood than/We can measure or imagine is/Surrounded by spinning black/Umbrellas—

After the Snake, the title of which evokes another Fall, is a haunting meditation on the apocalyptic landscapes that – if like Dun we have the courage to look at them – lie smoking on the boundaries of our consciousness.

What if I said / I will never / talk to stone / brush grown to a golden / edge needs sing all night / who care?

In my solitude / I’m stripped bare, but now / you’re here too, to some degree.

When the class that, unbeknownst to our age, we continue to attend, truly reaches its end, night falls on the self. What’s the use of clarifying it, full of tears?

An excerpt from Losarc Raal’s quasi-novella No Material, forthcoming from Black Sun Lit in 2023

Sometimes, when the origin of ideas of the sublime and the beautiful / are struck by lightning, I root into the hail of stones / at the precise center of the world / and sink into that dust.

To simply be a part of the changing afternoon light  The old man I see / in my visions is composed of all the days / in between  Your sense/awareness of who you are cannot be confined within / language  You go up to Medicine Bow / and open the sky and step through

A selection from Bret Schneider’s poetry cycle, Poems of the Drone Years

Better a handful / of calm than / two of clutching / at the wind….

Two new poems by Joel Newberger, read at the Caesura issue 1 event.

By the light of Psalm 151, we ask, what poet, writing now, is so ready for catastrophe as Rachel Blau DuPlessis? What living poet can so masterfully take up the Lurianic myth of the Breaking of the Vessels, do justice to its imaginative drama, fathom its complexities with an acute historical and critical awareness, yet sing this tale in a way that is both true to our secular moment, and true to the spiritual agonies at the heart of any such shattering as the tale tells.

Maybe now finally ink begins to flow into the nib of this Platignum calligraphy fountain pen I have not used probably since 1985. Yes maybe now finally. Maybe now. Maybe finally.

I am stupid, I am ungifted, I am awkward, but I pray to you, tall spruces. I am quite awkward, I am… a coward. Yesterday, I was frightened of a man I don't respect. It's because of my cowardice that I can't learn to ride a bicycle. I haven't enough will power for anything, but I pray to you, tall spruces.

I want to follow the paths of the stars, I tell myself. But this is not true. I want them to follow me. After all, the Earth is the center of the universe, and, as I am the center of the Earth, the universe revolves around me.

Three poems by Rainer J. Hanshe.

Eight poems from Matvei Yankelevich’s cycle From a Winter Notebook, accompanied by Hannah Whitaker’s photographs.

Deliver what? Deliver truth? Deliver us? For a poet engaged in composing “the secular word,” there is something disturbingly messianic about Heller’s vision.

“Imagine an encounter that goes unreported by language.”