of the earnestness in my (speaker’s) tone, of how her poems have at their heart concerns outside the self, which are also concerns within the self: meditations on massacre and greed, our great consuming appetites, our endless griefs, our pockets full of disaster, loose change of fortunes brought by the winds of commerce and calamity. How to answer, you ask? And then so smartly you say, by witnessing, in the tradition of documentary poetics. Coin for coin, money for money. The ledger’s filled with such scribbling. The mail brings your bill of return, wherein you send regrets, say you longed for a particular allowance for the gray, the deepening that comes from specificity and contradiction. How have you not noticed the details? Hummingbird drinking from a shattered dish. Fingers, breasts, and pelvises uncovered from the earth of hasty burial. The fallen, the fallen, the fallen whose faces are mostly dark, even after all this time.
In response to Via Negativa: Ovine.