Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.

Were You Heading For Wish Mountain?

They told you it was Wish Mountain
but it was a nuclear facility.

They told you you would meet your (long lost) parents there
but it was a few gurneys, head bands, et cetera.

Who let them drill into a mountain?
A real mountain, they told you “Which Mountain”.

You remembered the ad for Witch Mountain the movie.
The children were articulate in the movie.

Picture a gold medal.
Later they mention the beauty of the onion domes…

Everyone has gone home
but there are still repeating thoughts

around the atmosphere of Wish Mountain.
1976 becomes 1986.

In 2019, 1986 became the first year.
1986 overtakes 2019 which is four years so far.

What do we do in Witch Mountain
other than ruin the gurney?

Why are the witches so easily disgusted
in 2019 which is now lasting 5 years?

They are blinded by their own self control.

It’s the limited sympathy for U.
U: animals and vegetation. Us.

U is hard to ignore and too is wave-like in nature.
Subordinate witches must not have U.

I would like each to have U
for I agree with Bok’s premise of U as obscenity.

And obscenity is necessary
So we can relax.

Let’s dress them with Obscenity
so that they feel it for themselves.

Let them be bound like us but unlike us they’ll be gently rocked-
Let them be rocked ahead of their feelings.

For the radiant sense of the U: attention, desire and trespass

Who can say what happened here?

Our happening here, our passing over and they were our past.

A masked blast at the beginning of our time –

Faces we put on the forces –

Had we always been in the young grass?

The faces in the grass –

The importance of the grass –

The lovely theater in this mountain

of radiation.

Ish Klein‘s latest book of poems is called The New Sun Time. Her poems and plays have appeared in the journals What Happens, Oversound, Gare du Nord, Versal, and The Cambridge Literary Review. Ish debuted the podcast, Wrestling With Poetry in the Summer of 2023.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx