The island appeared in the playa – a thick family of vegetation in sand as if risen from the undulation of blued snow over grasses, purple. Huddling through time, as bodies green and dark in me knew better, yet compelled me to run from the tall thick house where I lay resting and take refuge from the wind where wind blew.
The feet trudge the path of the eyes.
Vouch for snow-covered trails skirted by galvanic tamaracks, the previous fall’s needles a carpet of #2 pins.
Vouch for garrulous waxwings captivating powerlines, mesmerizing middle C and rising, coloratura clouds.
Vouch for the rich acoustic world of moths fallen silent, streets of pupal stillness, bodies suspended in glycerol sleep.
I. THE SYMMETRY
In the beginning, they told us that only babies born with a herringbone of downy fuzz running the full length of their spines carried the gene. Then it was the nostrils: if one was larger than the other. From there, it grew into a hysteria of symmetry. If one eye was squintier the baby was a carrier. One ear higher. One testicle smaller. Left side of the labia fatter. Oh, how Richard squirmed at this. To think of his daughter having labia; such a prickly word for his pure baby girl whom we’d designed one night on a whiz of bubbly wine and goat cheese, right down to her delicate parts. That area I engineered, being the woman and inherently more attuned to shades of pink, shapes of flower petals, and all. But, still, nothing was guaranteed.
No, that’s not it, that’s not how it happens, it’s—
—because I’m here, have been for years and years, in the backseat of the Oldsmobile 88, top down, wind enraged, tearing along some country road at night, Jackson drunk at the wheel, Ruthie by his—
—the world all quick nervous giggles and skinfizz, the whirled world, the world like leaves spinning in a crazy autumn gust, only it’s not autumn, no, that’s, it’s what, it’s—
Still Life With Flying Sombreros
Three sombreros hung on pegs in a cantina, where their owners stood at a bar, soaking in the tequila. The sombreros got to talking and soon discovered they all despised their owners. “My man,” a sombrero said, “came home drunk every night and beat his wife and children with a hard stick he kept just for that purpose.” Another sombrero confessed that his owner sat on a porch and shot cats that had strayed into his garden. He skinned the cats and displayed their pelts over the fireplace.
birds, vital furniture for our eyes. The floor refoliatesa dozenfold. Monthsthese days waltztriple-timewithin us. Echoes of fundamental shapes. Great-
grandfather, Harry Houdini’s accountant.Isaac, our cousin the Don, muscled his way into King’s spitting distance.All told, saythe performance outlived the performer?O
She used the word alabaster too often. And breath, as if her body always knew what lay ahead, the repetition of need. Even absence became a title. Even then long shadows danced in the room, wind slithering under the door. There was a hint of that tricky left eye, still squinting, an itch to become worse. Fire had its annual appearance, though not at first, and always confused with a sense of death or doom. Throughout there was a certain rage, a questioning, “how can this be?” Rage might be a response to events, or it might have always simmered, a disorder from birth.
Holly gives Katja another look, but doesn’t say anything. They are walking beside a long snow-covered lake. High overhead, a red-tail hawk makes its frayed, lonesome kreee. At the end of the lake, they turn and tramp atop their own tracks, hurrying to make it home before the hospice aides leave. A gun shot loud enough to thump their chests sounds in the woods straight ahead. Then another. And another. The shots continue at varying intervals, growing ever louder. Eventually, Katja and Holly come to a clearing where a young man stands just behind a young woman, his arms reaching around her so that his left hand supports hers beneath the rifle stock, and his right hand envelops hers on the trigger. The man and woman are motionless. His shoulders tremble. A gunshot echoes off of hundreds of trees. A piece of paper snaps off a target pinned to a tree and flutters to the ground.
When you pull me from the waterTell me I fell. Say you saw it all. How I tripped at the edge.
When you pull me from the waterHold my face in your hands. Make my hair stand like a mountain. Turn off the bath faucet.
When you pull me from the waterAsk about my blood sugar. Worry over grapes I ate as lunch. Laugh at how I nearly slip back in.
When you pull me from the waterWipe chiggers from my ankles. Press my skin with your x’s. Numb all the ways they bite me.
She decided on a five-mile loop, walking a corridor of ashen and gray-brown tree trunks. Thistle sprouted spiky at the path’s edge, as did milkweed, their pods gray husks bent at the stems. Something in her quieted. When she got back, she’d try again with the pastels. She’d take a more delicate approach, not let herself overwork anything nor destroy her efforts even if bad.
You fell upwards into primacy,A response of bells and coldArias, clashes of mettle on metal.
Then you fell downwardsOutside of history’s graspUnder cold covers.
You felt the weight of days.The rolltop desk hid secretsOf your progress.
SAVED
Fear is an attentional function. Wishes depotentize over time.
Human nature is a child soldier. A walk on the beach
is a cold chapel where I played cello before a panel of wooden
chairs. Religion and war are peasant stunners, knee-high flags
on the village green.
This morning, Bard College released the following statement about its earlier decision to cease publication of Conjunctions at the end of this year. While negotiations toward continuing the journal under Bard’s aegis haven’t yet begun, we trust that they will be held in good faith.
I am beyond grateful to all of you for making your thoughts known, loud and clear, across various platforms. There is nothing little about “little magazines” and nothing small about “small presses.” These are the fertile proving grounds where so many writers can freely share their innovative voices and visions.
–Bradford Morrow, founder and editor of Conjunctions
In 2021, Conjunctions marked its fortieth anniversary, a milestone celebrated by the publication of a special anniversary issue and a series of online readings, defying the pandemic in order to bring some of our contributors live before a worldwide audience.
What cannot be defied, as it happens, is the economic pressure the pandemic has created in both education and publishing. For the last thirty of its forty years, Conjunctions has been published by Bard College. Sadly, I’ve been informed that the cost of continuing to publish the journal has become unsustainable for the college, which has made the decision to cease publication at the end of this calendar year. As a result, our fall 2022 issue, Conjunctions:79, Onword, will be the final issue published under the Bard imprint.
“Bard College is proud to have played a role in the extraordinary body of work created during the journal’s tenure here, enabling some of the most daring and distinguished literary voices of our time to find a home in print,” said Bard College spokesman Mark Primoff.
Editing and publishing a literary journal has historically never been for the faint of heart. I am deeply saddened by this turn of events, but I appreciate Bard’s having been a steadfast supporter of the journal for these past three decades.
In the meantime, we will publish our spring issue as scheduled. Conjunctions:78, Fear Itself, will feature works by Coral Bracho, Stephen Graham Jones, Brandon Hobson, Shane McCrae, Bronka Nowicka, Monica Datta, Joyce Carol Oates, Rick Moody, Julia Elliott, Kristine Ong Muslim, Jeffrey Ford, Quintan Ana Wikswo, as well as two former Bard Fiction Prize winners, Bennett Sims and Akil Kumarasamy, along with many others.
And Conjunctions:79, Onword, will feature some of the great pioneering writers of innovative poetry and prose whose work we have championed since their debuts or earliest publications, together with those whose voices are now just emerging. Our weekly online publication—widely read by an international audience—will also continue through the end of the year, offering exciting new writing and selections from the journal’s vast archives. We intend to preserve the Conjunctions website as a legacy archive for everyone to access.
We hope that you, our cherished, far-flung family of readers and writers, will enjoy these forthcoming issues and join us in celebrating the living notebook that has always been Conjunctions.
—Bradford Morrow, founder and editor of Conjunctions
I was indoctrinated early in the limits of good intentions.How could I love and still have done the cruelest thing I said I didn’t?Now I wait for my brother to call, though he hasn’t for years,
becausethat is how I’ll know that what I feared since childhoodis real.
She started to tell me a story about a friend of a friend, that she heard relayed online. The dog sprinted ahead to retrieve a ball that I pelted as far as I could. The dog brought the ball back to me, dropped it at my feet. I picked it up and flung it again, and off the dog sprinted, again. We interrupted her, mid-sentence: the dog with its return of the ball and my need to take a couple of steps to build up momentum for my pitch of the ball as far as my tiring, left arm allowed. How hard for her to tell her story in these conditions. I did this several times before she asked me, irritably, if I wanted to hear the story or not.
I took an empty vinegar bottle
filled it with tap water
and slowly emptied it
searching for an allegory
I settled for a purge
While strangers come and go at the estate sale a town of sparrows overtakes a fallen limb twittering their news pecking for position dominating and submitting. The birds stay like a restlessness can stay until the light leaps from the house tears over the trees and the hills. I walk as a ghost in the yellow house touch the china on their table stand beside the bed they sailed in buy one of their many books on theosophy. I fall in love with the lovers and their old-fashioned names take up my place on their bench watching their house for its story.
The Buddha watches emptiness. He is unemployed a beggar possibly crazy. He lives outside the law on public land against the principle that state and church are separate. No wonder he keeps getting arrested and removed.
November 7, 2019
At midday it’s still warm enough to swim. They take a long hot shower afterwards. By the evening it’s cool, and swimming seems audacious. Helen heats up soup and toasts day-old bread, which is enough for dinner. They have clementines for dessert, peeling them without speaking. Her hair has dried before she’s combed out her cowlick.
Nabil has taught her it’s okay not to talk, to just hang on and trust that someone will stay close. When they were first together, she still talked so much, which was how she had always been: pressing, driving, insisting on understanding, revealing. But there is so much neither will ever know about the other. They have lived so much life prior to meeting.
It is a hot day out there and here inside the raw cool moronic hum of the conveyer you’re soothed by the song of that flat black path transporting items at a safe, considered pace to the terminus of this shopping haul, the ambulatory beeps from the cashier’s key-padding or her face or the crown of her head or wherever the fuck it’s leaking out, this woman’s disinterest, her analog margin of error tempered through skilled human agency, foolproof PLUs, printed receipt. Love this grocery. You can’t go wrong here.
Now that the little lies accrue into the vast incredulity, fear on fear swells: a wave.
Slipping down the dune or climbing? Who can tell? The small cries, growing smaller, fly past and vanish.
The hope of non-sleepers is sleep, sleep is the food of all living presence, and time is the food of sleep. Time is a physiological condition, in addition to being a pit of holes. Sleep and wake are genres. Despite all appearances to the contrary, and notwithstanding dreams, sleep is a season. If you jump ahead, skip episodes of sleep, fragment the night, you lose the poetry of daytime. Daytime becomes a plot-driven slog; all it thinks about is sleep.
The trees conspiring to create eternity again.Our bodies with every tendon, sheath, and auricleintending to grow old again. Breath finding wings,lungs, skin. Hearts becoming rooms, again.
A little mouth with little teeth. Nuns! Not one. None! Human reproduction on a copy machine. Odor; three-sided rhomboids; the social life of the page —in several hands, all of the seventeenth century. The hair at the back of my head; the drum in your chest.
