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

 

Contingent

 

It is there as part of its anatomy.

 

When too much there is not here

either, escape transpires through the formal. Im-

precise repetitions. Breathing. There’s a train runs amok

of the news, Haven and York, and on board

I can exist as neither girl, harp, woman

nor fiberglass. What happens

happens because of the way light twists

as it filters in. Celluloid’s amber

turned flypaper. Never ride a train before noon

when its spiraling bullets make of passengers

rodents, skittering forth with gnawing

mouths in promulgation of the

illusion: progress.

                                  Evenings

when the light tangles around bodies loosely

in the compartment, and you’ve been gotten

wine from the café car, when all status

is in tantalizing question—you can

allow yourself to wax. Grow big by refusing

use. They will never know what not to do

with you. This is layering, a vanish into

potential, a technique to impossibilize

biography. My material they may long to have

illuminated. But I am no monk, no man-

uscript. And within this doubt

no woman you cannot.

 

(Eva Hesse)

 

Kirsten Kaschock, a recent Pew Fellow in the Arts and Summer Literary Seminars grand prize winner, is the author of five poetry books: Unfathoms (Slope Editions), A Beautiful Name for a Girl (Ahsahta Press), The Dottery (University of Pittsburgh Press), Confessional Science-fiction: A Primer (Subito Press), and Explain This Corpse (Lynx House Press). Coffee House Press published her debut speculative novel—Sleight. Work from her current ekphrastic ms. is forthcoming from American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, and A Public Space.

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