Earlier lying around the yard 

We had just begun to feel being eaten 

When Tyrus chanced 

Upon the decomposing owl. 

He held it up in the sun: 

More beautiful than words! we agreed. 

But this before us other two 

Had embarked on that mundane but fatal errand— 

The rusted station wagon pausing 

Aside the sandy highway, 

Its chancy crew, 

The baby backseat moaning, 

Our teeth gritting as Tyrus never knew, 

And finally, when already having made the turn 

Off Folly Road back into the neighborhood, 

That half-smirk clipped instantly flat in the rearview 

Suggesting sobriety 

But meaning something rather opposite that. 

By then the owl’s feet must’ve nearly finished baking. 

Through the years they were the envy of all 

Who chanced to pass, 

Perched in eternity upon the parlor wall. 

But as for luck they never proffered any,

Tyrus, alone, would sadly recall.

The boundary between prose-poetry and flash-fiction is blurry at best; it’s just so hard to tell the difference. Even when considering prose-poetry by itself, it’s hard to say whether it is better classified as prose for its narrative style, or rather belongs to the genre of poetry for its attention to language and use of metaphor.

And then of course the other question is, prose-poetry, poetic prose, flash-fiction—as long as it’s good, why bother with labels? In other words, who cares? But the truth is, we kind of care, we do. And by we we mean many of us readers, editors, cyclists, skells, and many a great debater. What we’re really asking is: what is a poem? The need for distinction comes from the realization that if there isn’t one, then anything can be called a poem, hence the word (world!) would be meaningless. Might as well call poems objects and our magazine “LEVELER Objectivism.” But we refuse; even knowing there will never be a clear answer, we’ll continue being suspicious of all our beloved poetic identifiers: line breaks (is their usage sufficient for a written piece to be called a poem?), metaphor (doesn’t it exist in any kind of literature?), attention to language (any great writer who doesn’t have that?), economy/using few words to say plenty (but then how about “Don Juan”? “The Prelude”? “The Wasteland”?). The answer to each of those questions could be any of the following: definitely yes, obviously no, sometimes, oftentimes, not in a million years.

Having cleared that up, we can now talk about the poem.

What’s most intriguing about Matt Marinovich’s poem is the speaker/skell connection. First, it is night (dark then), yet the speaker can tell the skell’s hand is “protected by old beach towels.” Quite a particular image for a detail that had to be noticed in a short moment. Second, he seems to have spent quite some time with the same cars the skell did. He knows of the torn “black fabric of [the Fleetwood’s] roof” and knows it was once green. He sees particular shapes, “lozenge eyes” of the Honda and “oblong pattern” of the skell’s blood. His shattered window comes to life in shape and color as “baby blue beads of broken glass.” He is almost too close to the scene, and nearly intertwined with his skell. It’s too inviting for us not to say about the speaker what he says about the skell: “[m]aybe he was crazy. Maybe he was just specific.”

If, however, we keep them separate and rely on the speaker’s story as is, it is ironically easy to feel affection for the skell. First, because he is dubbed “some skell.” Second, because like the speaker we can imagine him bringing the bike back to his children and understand why he is given to crime. Third, because we know it is rarely possible for something to just “[snap] into the right place” so that a person who fell to thievery would be enlightened in a quick moment and change forever.

At the same time, it is also easy to feel for the speaker. A large man riding your daughter’s purple bicycle—hey, that’s just wrong! Yet a large man on a tiny bicycle with “his knees splayed outwards” is also hilarious.

Looking into the Fleetwood again, the speaker says, “In the back seat, rain fell on a heap of old newspapers that some driver had once collected.” This could be a poem by itself, à la WCW (the poet, not the wrestling team). Especially since the main story is already over, the ending serves as a poetic afterthought. We’re given one final peculiar look into the broken car. Peeping in, the speaker sums up the poem, concludes his narration, and describes his underlying state of mind with a single image: “it smelled like a dirty birdcage.”

- The Editors

P.S. Speaking of WCW, hasn’t the anti-LeBron James mayhem gone too far?

At night, some skell was punching in the windows of the cars parked along the gates of the cemetery and I could hear it from my apartment, more wary of the silence afterwards. I don’t know what he was looking for or what he thought he’d find. But he protected his hand with old beach towels and left them behind, bristling with glass. The kind of cars left there were rusted vaults already. Spraypainted Econolines, an old Fleetwood that was once green, the black fabric of its roof chewed away, a gray Honda with flat tires and rimless wheels with lozenge eyes. Once, on a drunken night I gave up trying to find responsible parking and left my Maxima there. I woke up hours later, troubled by something and heard the thump and shatter of a windshield. Running outside in unlaced sneakers, I saw the open trunk. A hundred yards away a large man with short black hair was slowly riding my daughter’s purple bicycle, his knees splayed outwards, his thick right hand dripping a line of bright blood that didn’t seem to bother him at all. I stood on a square of sidewalk and he circled me once. I know he circled me because I saw the oblong pattern of his blood later, still sticky, the drops growing sparse as he sped off, the training wheels rattled by every concrete crack. I cursed my own cowardice for hours afterwards and drove the car till dawn looking for him. The passenger seat was lined with baby blue beads of broken glass, my face was going numb from the cold air sweeping in at every green light. My nose was running like I had a cold and it was the beginning of summer. Later, when I calmed down, I imagined he brought the bicycle home to his daughter or son, and that something in him snapped into the right place, but a few days afterwards, he was at it again, breaking car windows again. Windows of cars he’d already broken. He didn’t touch the nicer cars on the other side of the street. So, I don’t know. Maybe he was crazy. Maybe he was just specific. By the end of August, the Fleetwood didn’t even have a side pane left. In the back seat, rain fell on a heap of old newspapers that some driver had once collected. When I leaned my head in the open window, careful to avoid scraping my neck skin against the one remaining shard of glass, it smelled like a dirty birdcage.

The best directive for how to read Doug Paul Case’s “Upon a Line by Michael Cunningham” is the line by which it is inspired. Let’s begin with the introductory clause, “A bee thumps heavily.” There are a lot of things bees are known for—their stripes, their honey, their sting. One thing they aren’t known for is their obesity. Yet here, the insect that appears practically weightless as it hovers over flowers in the wild, is thumping “heavily.” Significantly, this poem, which at first glance appears to be a goofy little imaginative rant about a busy bee in one’s kitchen, invites a much heavier figurative reading.

After imagining that the bee “crashes” into his kitchen, the speaker wonders what it might do there: “Will it construct a colander nest? Try to pollinate / the freshly-cut roses […]?” Given that this poem is written by a human and that its readers are all human, it’s hard not to think of its content in relation to human life. The bee’s first hypothetical future compares easily with any person who aims to literally or figuratively build a home. Renowned as one might be at building, the home is going to have holes in it. What next? Try to pollinate. That is (fourth grade science refresher!), try to bring the male and female parts together, allowing for reproduction. After working and working to make homes and babies, only one thing awaits us—death. Ugh. Maybe we’ll drown, maybe we’ll get trapped in the fridge, maybe will die “under [the] knife,” but one thing is certain—we’ll die. Thus, the first line instructs us again. Our heavy thumping is also done “insistently.”

Part of the strength of Case’s work is his attention to language. In no place is this more obvious than the strangeness of the final phrase, “slicing eggs.” Here, “slicing” can serve as both a verb and an adjective modifying “eggs.” In a poem that encompasses the concepts of birth and death, these words deserve even greater attention. In other places too, Case’s word pairings present dichotomies of pleasantry and pain. The roses are “freshly-cut” in line five. Similarly, this time at the close of the poem’s first line, inside the frame that allows the speaker to look both outward and inward, there’s a “windowpane.”

- The Editors

A bee thumps heavily, insistently, against a windowpane.

Watching from the counter, I wonder what it will do

when it crashes through, finding itself in my kitchen.

Will it construct a colander nest? Try to pollinate

the freshly-cut roses, resting in cool water?

Perhaps it will drown amidst the thorns, get trapped

in the refrigerator, or slide under my knife, slicing eggs.

There is something at once off-putting and enticing about this poem’s densely Latinate title. It is essentially a kind of technical, academic jargon, but it also rolls off the tongue (the two words are both six syllables and the “ph” and “th” of their respective words lend an interesting parallel rhythm to the words). It is intriguingly vague, but without a dictionary of poetic terms and a handbook of Latin etymology (or both: Wikipedia!), it is impenetrable. As is the case with much technical language, we have very little connotative baggage to bring to a word like “epiphenomenal.” Even a word like “epithalamium,” which has served as a title or subtitle for numerous poems (1, 2, 3, and 4 for example), cannot direct a reader’s emotional or intellectual attention other than to say “this poem is about a wedding.”

As mentioned, “epithalamium” is a nice big word referring to a poem composed to honor a marriage. But the title’s adjective modifier, “epiphenomenal,” opens the poem to a bit more possibility. An epiphenomenon is simply one of two or more coinciding phenomena. Epiphenomenalism, though, refers to the dualistic notion that mental states have no effect on the physical world and that they are, in fact, the results—the “epiphenomena”—of the physical world. Either application of “epiphenomenal” goes a long way toward explaining the other obvious feature of Michael Leong’s poem: its structure.

Since our minds seem trained to identify groups of words as each having a collective goal, it feels natural to read the dual columns of Leong’s poem both together and individually. None of these three readings alone (left, right, and both together) is as strong as all three together. By separating the poem into two vague halves, Leong has enacted the “resonance,” “playback,” and “elongated echoes” mentioned in the poem. The speaker’s early claim, “the path of / least / resistance is / resonance,” becomes a blueprint for reading the poem. We are unable to lean on any one concrete point of reference, but instead can hear the poem swirl around us, bouncing off of itself across a chasm of white space. Apply this to “epiphenomenal,” and the poem’s bifurcation becomes a way to explain the conjoining of two extraordinary bodies and a way to understand that the separation of two ideas, here emotion and physicality, does not necessarily belittle one or the other. Despite the poem’s brevity, its philosophy is large. That such ideological breadth can be found in twelve very short lines about a wedding is surprising, powerful, and exciting.

And they are twelve short lines about a wedding—at least partially. The “eloping” of the final line is a peace offering to those searching for tangibility in a world of echoes. It sets the poem back into an explicitly “epithalamium” mode, and lets us feel like we might just be reading about an actual marriage between two people who love each other, ultimately helping the reader bring the two dearly beloved halves of this poem together in holy matrimony.

- The Editors

In his essay, “Yeats, Eliot, Pound – The Symbolist Inheritance,” C.K. Stead writes of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “It forces us to recognize that a poem is a verbal machine far more complex in its operations than any meaning it may be said to have, or express, or contain–and to recognize perhaps that this is so even in the case of poems […] which apparently exist to make statements or yield up meanings.” The question then, Stead asks, is how do we read such a poem?

We could make lots of guesses as to what the “meaning” is behind Lee Boyle’s “Chautauqua: Nights On The Beach,” but the poem, like Eliot’s and lots of poems since, is not built to confirm any singular interpretation. It resides, from the very beginning, in an attention to language most obviously manifested through the juxtaposition of opposites.

Take the title, for example. “Chautauqua,” a specific place with an inimitable name, is paired with the romance novel-esque “Nights On The Beach.” The decision to separate the specific and the clichéd with a colon creates a ratio that suggests both sides are equal. Significantly, Boyle chooses to capitalize every word of the title. Thus, we’re ushered into a world where the words “On” and “The” are just as important as “Chautauqua” or “Beach.”

Placing opposites on equal footing continues in the opening stanza. We’ve got “tiny hills” next to “stone steps”; “branches arch[ing] over” next to “a child’s chapel”; an inflatable “raft” being carried toward a “big clock.” If nothing else, the world Boyle creates mirrors the real world in that it can be as soft, airy, and natural as it can be hard, heavy, and industrial.

Re-reading this poem, it’s easy to be attracted to its craft. Yet, on a first read, most of the stuff we’ve mentioned so far probably goes unnoticed. And here lies the most important aspect of a poem built like Boyle’s: the reader. Because the poet doesn’t present a clear narrative, because he’s chosen to break the poem into distinct sections, the reader is left to fill in the gaps. In the context of each solitary life, no “striped shirt” is the same as another.

- The Editors

I.

Chautauqua’s tiny hills, stone steps;

branches arch over.  A child’s chapel

keeps meditative exploration

sacred in me, my small figure

carrying a raft towards a big clock

on the beach.

I like when night starts in, makes

views hard; my parents squint to see me

scamper over grass in distance.  Always,

I submit, running back to them.

II.

I compare my inflated raft to clouds.  Feels like

I lift a sky like blankets

under little fingers, striped shirt.

III.

Bathroom under the looming clock.  I drop

my new stuffed bear in a toilet

by accident.  Pull him out; run

away.