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.

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

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.

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.

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 auricle
intending 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.

Spent flowers rich, somehow, in decay,
in time passing, the effects of.  Certain words left behind.
Pages turned, turned from—dreams in new cities, of weather
in new cities, something lost in transition, something brought
across the sky, a scar in a storm.  I have inflicted my only
serious injuries.

Take a break to look at the indigo clouds
It’s time you owned up
to rinsing the heavens
and hanging them out to dry

I fell asleep with my girlfriend’s head on my shoulder, but woke to a too-familiar absence—one that had somehow followed us down all those highway miles—her body a shadow on the other bed that could have belonged to anyone, could have been an axe murderer for all I knew, but I just closed my eyes and willed whatever future was coming to hurry, I was tired of waiting for it. On my second waking the sun was shouldering its way into the room through the crack in the curtains, my girlfriend now missing from both beds, and the room was made strange by her disappearance so that I flung myself out from under the covers. I found her in the bathroom with her hands on either side of the sink, the water running and There’s something wrong with it Liv she said.

The fathers drowned and scientists were baffled.
All over the world fathers met their end in water. Fishing fathers drowned in rivers, swimming fathers drowned in lakes, tanning fathers drowned in backyard pools. Bathing fathers drowned in tubs and surfing fathers were sucked in the sea’s undertow. Fathers panning for gold drowned in creeks. A father was found dead with his head in an overflowing sink near dishes slick with syrup from breakfast. A father in a bathrobe was discovered face down in a puddle in the parking lot of a department store. Deep within a national forest, a father was found upended with both black rubber boots stuck up high from a primitive outhouse’s chamber hole. He would have looked funny if he weren’t dead.
Fathers in other countries, fathers of celebrities, rich fathers, poor fathers, fathers only known in passing, cherished fathers, stepfathers, fathers of strangers and fathers of friends. They drowned and drowned.

   The day you told me the world was ending, you had inquired about a particular scent for treating your mother’s lapses in memory (further complicating the matter by saying that your father, the primary witness to her memory loss, was also deteriorating himself). I assured you there was no such perfume.

            As a joke or token of consolation, I showed you a favorite scent of my mother’s, which had played no small part in enchanting my father. It was a perfume heavy with middle notes, or heart-notes, as we call it, which take longer to dissipate. It had no medical basis for treating pre-existing memory loss, but the scent alone was potent enough to provide an olfactory anchor at the moment of inhalation—a perfumed time-stamp. 

            Of course the world was ending, I said. Everything was always ending. 

I stretch into
a shape. Do as I’m told

in plastics. Each mold

is a house
is an ocean but

only now do I know
his death was never some renewable

substance. The whale sank away––

out of contact …

Launch

codes, we stripped species,
            our insecure
hands of gloves
to crack the test           to our capitalizable
future. Pray
            for the multiverse I’m working on
at midnight.