its cracked screen, tell him to take
the A train on Canal, tell him to cross
the bridge, tell him to hand over
his fucking money, tell him
to meet me in the mall,
tell him the history of ideas
is a series of miscalculations
each demarcating various
assumptions of mapped space,
reveries that mangle
then re-cohere into lesser,
but nevertheless raging
trajectories of departure. Tell him I want
to go faster, into the air, beyond
the accident of our moment,
the point where an invisible rope
yanked taut between
impassable hours of leisure
pulls back, a little harder,
the second you resist, and you fly
from the vehicle hurling you
forward. Speed
is a market of energy
directed toward excess.
Once you stop, then what?
We can’t stop, yet the consuming fantasy
to do so upgrades my sense of the need
to go all the faster.
We move at some new rate
toward the indeterminate point
at which something happens
but simultaneously obscures
the character that would
enable us to define it—up
the mountain along
the mountain road into
a world caught in the midst
of its material ceremonies as they
break down. I see something
in them, probably the face of Ciara,
caught between the leaves,
annotating each glimpse
of the woods with another
opaque name heroizing
this yet unbranded age. I ride
into it, a future slashed
at the horizon, lying
just below the setting sun, into
the point at which
it rises over me to summer
in the shadows shifting
so rapidly
as to seem
to not exist
at all.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I could not have written this book without the insight, advice, and friendship of Ben Fama, Ed Halter, Ian Hatcher, Lucy Ives, Kevin Killian, Trisha Low, Jacolby Satterwhite, Tim Terhaar, and Carl Williamson. Most of all, I am grateful for the attention and continuous support of Stephen Motika, who firmly believed in this book before it was ever a book. Some of these pieces first appeared in the Boston Review, The Destroyer, Epiphany, Fence, The Miami Rail, Out of Order, Pocket Notes, and Triple Canopy. Thanks to Travis Meyer and Stacey Tran at Poor Claudia for publishing a selection of this book as the chapbook Believers in Fall 2013. “Prism” was included in Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics (Black Ocean 2014), edited by Andrew Ridker. Lastly, I would be nowhere without the love and support of my mother, father, and sister.
Andrew Durbin co-edits Wonder and lives in New York.
NIGHTBOAT BOOKS
Nightboat Books, a nonprofit organization, seeks to develop audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcends boundaries. We publish books rich with poignancy, intelligence, and risk. Please visit nightboat.org to learn about our titles and how you can support our future publications.
This book has been made possible by grants from The Fund for Poetry and the New York State Council on the Arts Literature Program. Support was also provided by a Face Out grant, funded by The Jerome Foundation and administered by The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.
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