New Writing

Brian Strang

ring of teeth

The lessons are replacing what brought them about. Everything threatens perspective, dimensionless and matte-gray. An all-powerful landscape takes us above the soil in a formless freedom, a uniform gesture convincing as heavy clay, an ample admission, stale as it is pragmatic at all points. To get out of poor beginnings what begins to dominate all of your senses. A foreign element has been introduced into your genetic makeup.

An immovable wilderness is pocked with attempts to dislodge it—what we cannot imagine delivers us. We watch dramatically as the new year brings a commotion, an orb that deepens memory.

Here there are grand hotels, armies of servants for the saints, and lilies grow from the dead. Ice shelves crack into the abyss. But the supermarkets are imbedded with arsenic and the cruelty of this calendar empire is stamped on our brows. And other more reversible problems burrow through the heart.

Brian Strang reads at SPT with Brenda Coultas on October 10, 2003