noteworthy
In each issue, the editors choose a writer whom they would like to bring
to the readers' attention.In this issue, poet Nick Admussen is highlighted.
Tension, strength and control are what draws us to Nick Admussen's poetry. "This position is hard to hold but beautiful" he writes in "Arabesque." By turns witty, wistful and honed, Admussen's work leaves us at the edge where "the night gets middle-aged and furtive" and we fix "on the laboratory urge to start again." In Admussen's parlance, there is "nothing giving the sense of motion like the pre-leap moment, frozen." Welcome, reader, to the frozen moment of Nick Admussen's poetry.
Arabesque
Trying to Be Still
Deer, Hightailing
Review
The Country Not Knitting Behind You
Bus Accident, Gulou District
In Japanese Comics, They Say "..."
Dating in Nanjing
Nature Scene
Why and Why
Circus
Wedding
Landscape with As If
The building ticks like a clock or bomb
with the force of the wind rushing past it:
I am too old to benefit from a cataclysm,
too weak to leverage a strong back in the absence
of mechanized agriculture, yet I dream
of cataclysm still.
Would I kill. Would I steal guns or
divorce my life. Would I drink my last wine
and take all the pills of the old civilization.
Would I finally try to be a preacher,
or scuttle into the darkness with what books
I think are infinite. Would I not feel as I do.
This position is hard to hold but beautiful.
A person falling, extended, imagining a stage
that lacks them, hoping for it, perhaps, fields
of wheat hanging on only where there is weather
and water to sustain them, tartness of fear forgotten,
just heaps of natural bodies.
A dream for the well-fed, the burgher, the salaried
officer. As if the system itself is examining
the world without it, the bank savoring its collapse,
inert within. Nothing more anathema to violence
than the quiet dream of it. Nothing giving the sense
of motion like the pre-leap moment, frozen.
So this poem is kind of toeing the ledge.
It is thinking down into the gully
and performing fearless mental calculus
about the world without it, which fills
in first with green virtual contour lines
then polygons then the tender grasses
as it becomes as real as it can.
If it disappears do you have one less thing
to read, does "to" mean "you can"
or "you probably should" because the poem
hates the idea of your responsibility for it
the poem doesn't want to put you out
this poem always liked you and the lame
music you play when you're sad.
If it disappears do you have one less thing
that makes you happy even though it repeats itself
it has maybe been drinking some and sways
slowly reels in the light breeze nobody
wants to make it tougher on you, you have it
plenty hard enough, challenges, not like the poem
idle and alone, kicking a pebble to watch it drop.
If it disappears, look, it can hear you laughing at it
it is not the world's best poem but it is not stupid
it knows the exact way in which it takes itself
too seriously but has no real alternative to pretending
that it exists in some relationship to you
to your soft clothes and how you always still need
something that is a little bit in the future.
The poem was about holding a pan of water in your lap
and watching reflected light dicker around atop.
Its name was “Trying to Be Still.”
The answer is clatter of hooves.
Bend the distance, break the line
of sight, forget what gets left. We fastest
are easiest lost and always alone.
A raised white tail says look, says
chase me, dirty bouncing energy
in the hips is the body's fantasy
of the predator tireless and salivating.
The grip of the homeland is light;
the lust of the startle is fierce.
Do not, after all, ask your question.
We hear now only in jagged noticing.
The idea is cowardice; the action’s an art,
coil of muscle come of effacing
flee in favor of go, we are brushfire
spiking gold in an irresponsible wind.
Shades down, the anxiety
like a cheap brand
of lamplight, the results come in
all night: this will not save you,
that will not save you, this here
will not save you and additionally
cannot be touched or spoken of.
On the desk they are sullenly
accepting that there won't
be any New China, and I as well
have a genetic emperor
who is cold, he is such bad company.
The night gets middle-aged
and furtive: the findings start
to rub each other out, the edges
go hard-determined for a moment
then sink into classical blur. You know,
I could hurt anybody, I have been here
a long time in the midsummer heat,
line to line, page to page weary.
The desk is just a field burdened
by rectangular forms, the blank shade
down over a black flat shade's so thin
it could roll into a flute.
The monarch is just a stranger
in twisted clothes, married to his cousin,
in sex thinking son son like a nasty joke;
my bells and gongs, my practices,
the sinking and rising in waves —
this is the same country
and we are older now,
when I was fighting I never really saw
the night through the open curtain,
how it reels, sinks in place,
and drives up from one knee wearing
the mask of its identical face.
The Country Not Knitting Behind You
Here is the nubbin of the trudge, and here,
the hamlet right at the first abraded layer.
At some point to go will have been to go past,
not continue, something excessive
and it is dark and the people who live here
have broken down their shops.
Here is the part of the trip where the skin
reacts to clot itself shut, dawn and traffic
like an abattoir, a perversion of tongues,
networks of equal and oozing crossroads,
and you try to think home in the run of sluice
and home as you pick past the litter.
Then here is the bent-backed exhausted step
underneath which the skin is forgotten
and will never return. Then here a soft hillock
of muscle and the sun going down over it,
and now it is dark and ahead is the marker
for the long, white highway to the capital.
Traffic here has many accidents,
but this was special because a foreigner
was driven down into the road,
and they are usually very paranoid,
and because I am a foreigner too.
Everyone looked at me
as if I was part of his clan:
nope. Strangers means strangers
to each other, as well.
Onlookers stood around uneasily
waiting for someone to arrive
and burst into tears and wail the name
as is customary almost anywhere.
Nooooobody. Nooooobody.
There was a general feeling
of no particular rush,
the intersection was closed, we were
going to be here forever
until someone got a call
not we regret to inform but
did your son wear a
or eventually we'd just all go home,
well, they would, I would go
elsewhere,
because you can disappear, you can just
stop and nobody finds out,
there even exists a procedure, a bureau
where such matters are forgotten.
And what else did we two come here for
but that office, its smooth-turning wheel?
In Japanese Comics, They Say "..."
and look away from your eyes,
as if we are in embarrassing error
and are not young birds in lean years
breaking from the egg to starve alone.
"..." carries alchemical feeling
distinct from any name we call it. Gamblers
use a carefully faked careless motion
in surrendering bad cards, it is a craft
of calling back wealth;
onlookers behind them, shocked, say "...",
a not speaking with an open empty mouth
inside it, watching something stripped
from the fingertips, returning to ruin.
But what's lost is nothing. It is unmeasured
silence: little bodies strangling
in the deep stacks of nature, thousands,
ten ten thousands of small shut beaks.
We turn away. We fix on live witnesses,
the wet of their parted lips, their wasted word,
the mute desire to make a vowel,
the transmutation of waste metal,
the laboratory urge to start again.
This is how it starts: one person
carries another
on the back of a bicycle.
It is normal, there is
a place to perch above the wheel.
Of course, I have seen old women
after the husband dies first
cheerfully take up knitting,
as well as those who coast
wild-eyed into traffic sidesaddle
having never learned the handlebars.
And I have seen that occasionally
the very bicycle is revealed
as fiction, and both parties
have actually always been at home.
And I have seen a bicycle rear up
and gore a man, and have seen
women call taxis.
And I've been sore in the saddle,
have choked down the luggage rack,
I have oil stains, eggshell helmet,
flying sensation, release from effort,
softening thighs, dying first, the race
loser's regret, the lipstick marks
of traffic.
I guess I have seen some situations.
I guess all I can say is that I am here
with you, in some relationship
to some bicycle, and that now
we are balanced and at speed.
Clambering by diagonals in unbuildinged steel,
the second the rivets begin to seem comfortable
pressing at our thin-soled shoes
I stop feeling the headlong grab
of time at the temples.
You stretch along a girder
and don't sleep: I throw gravel at iron
to hear it ring, then hum.
Maybe I'll do it to you soon, again.
We are well within the skeleton of things,
what happens is inexplicable, the structure
invisible, unfinished.
Late-day sun filtered to squares by the beams
hangs, a moment, and it is no longer clear
whether this is the premonition
of a future gesture of the city,
or the trail of its departure;
soon I am watching you from a high coordinate
in the referential grid, and it does not distinguish
slipping from leaping, or climbing from falling.
In Sumatra the Japanese police tracked me down,
the well was on a loose-rocked slope,
he'd had more to drink than I had been thinking,
the virus went airborne.
You were going to a party whose theme was Angels
and Devils. You chose Devils.
This was someone else's corner and got defended,
she'd loaded it, she yelled that out,
not heart attack but myocardial infarction,
poison on the canetip.
You wore the most revealing clothes you owned
because you were being the opposite of yourself.
The cage door was rusty and stuck,
we had been running for so many hours,
it was insisted upon by the government,
my safety-thumbing thumb had long been severed.
And I came in through the door with a fake tail,
convinced for the time that cause causes effect.
The safety line and the net below have been inspected
I've met a lot of hospice nurses from Haiti
because palliative care pays pretty well
the audience is bursting with their preparation to feel
and will shower even failures with love
the inspector viciously despises Haitians
he is a classic bad man
the net is spider silk and strong as the rule of law
the nurse who will take care of you has been spit on
there is one bad drunk at the safety line factory
don't worry, we do this all the time
nobody has the heart to fire the drunk
the audience will go crazy if you don't even try
the inspector is in it for the money
the nurse is in it for the money
you have soiled yourself and you call out for someone
the audience is nibbling after blood
the drunk isn't in it at all
you have been delivered a fine proposition
you are in it for the money
people die in Haiti all the time it is a national industry
beneath the net, the third of three rings
beneath the ring, an abandoned ice rink
the audience can taste your neck snapping
the inspector has never been loved by a woman
the nurse never arrives, the spider
sleeps obese in the corner of your net
the spider is a little touched with painkillers
it is not super sure it remembers what it made all this for
I married in secret because of the war.
Alone it was possible to remain
neutral but where two or more were gathered
a faction could be identified.
The priest opened his gaudily
dirty mouth and hissed against the sodomites,
he brandished a contract and I pretended I was
with the resistance, that she and I had a shelter
in the forest past a trap door.
I signed
my wrong name.
A joy in war must float like air, evade
the grip, remain like air.
I wonder if she even knows, she is gone
smuggling our feelings to the partisans,
ringless, light-footed, tightly veiled.
As if the hills were a decision,
and the feeling of life in the curve
of the hills was that decision
passed and signed;
and the motion that seems to animate
the horizon in peripheral vision,
but ceases under examination is
a reticent okay, an
all right then.
As if it were the sight of leaves rotating
like hands on supple wrists that caused
the sussuration, the ocean hiss,
distant, obeyed, warning to stay back,
and the glitter of the creekslash
is tended by the fish inside it,
who clarify the paint and wipe
the grime.
As if the world and my secrets
have ever cared about each other.
Nick Admussen is the author of the chapbook Movie Plots, published by Epiphany Editions. His work has appeared in magazines like Boston Review, Seneca Review, DIAGRAM and Blackbird, and is forthcoming in Fence. He is currently a Ph. D. candidate in Chinese literature at Princeton University.
