5 poems
from No Prizes
No Prizes
Parents of an ill child
who stoke or aggravate minor
conflicts and insensitivities
an instance wherein the other
sets about the self, which i
am built into, which makes me
recognizable, or
again, other actions, amorous
language, one regime to another’s
complicity to coldness, to silence
the other sets about making a break
which disrupts my being present,
while i am
i'll never speak to you again
else that i am bringing
myself to my own impasse
never speaking
neither standing
nor lying down, ever
Gifts
Festivals are
what the cathedral is
in its place,
what we expected of our work,
an unheard of totality
stands there, the totality of
world withdrawal and decay
a mother, the object of her
child's jokes, whose ever shifting
yoke is that the mother's encountered presence
signifies satisfactions
beyond passions and
bygone landscapes; that
whatever we become can
never extend outside
what she’s modeled—that i
accept, implicitly, that
night whispered as the opposite of
whisper settled on rocky ground
but now i have before me
before me all the belongings;
my subsistence living
through the days as if my days
had fled me—accepting everything
i am given, never thinking of others,
and living this way forever
In Private
Depresses me. note not
much else be said of,
from memory,
a lot of what i’d learned
or invented—could
the analogy of the sum
of man containing his
impressions, rather the
sum of his impressions
of senses—that any image might
invoke a choice towards a
o mountain o lord, i’d’ve
once a’comin’ down the hill
towards the—and yellow
dotted surface of the—
down a steep grade
that felt like a set of stairs
For Everyone Else
When
you rained
on the ground
& put you
in a fire
that is placed
in a fire;
column
catching the sun
Limited Possibilities
On the heights and behind the favored
arrangement of heroic monuments.
blue uniforms having marked
the current, we once again,
having seen black clouds,
cannons, cannonballs, a carpet
of shimmering bayonets, felt
a weakness for
an hour or two, less
and less time in an overtly complex
survival plan and injured
grunts coming up from
the field. it was
the sum of modern
techniques and qualifiers that
were as weak as
they were useless, every
detail staged, and on
that stage the reality
is more difficult than
too difficult to bear
Dustin Neu is a poet and translator from rural California. He co-translated Alessandro de Francesco's Remote Vision (Punctum Books) from the Italian and his poetry has appeared in VOLT, Hardly Doughnuts, and 3am. He lives with his wife, son, and four cats in Napa and teaches high school.