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

after No Other Land

The new line
that contains everything

all at once
does not have to be

long like Whitman’s
heartfelt declarations of love

to everybody. Everybody,
unimpressed by his

somersaults of extended exemplification, asks
Which one Walt?

Who do you love?
The new line

does not want to be in bed
with the world,

it just wants
to belong

to a neighborhood
that isn’t going to be

bulldozed
by settlers.

Joe Elliot helped run a weekly reading series at the Zinc Bar in New York City for many years. He now co-hosts a monthly series, Overhear, at the Lofty Pigeon Bookstore in Brooklyn. He is the author of If It Rained Here, a collaboration with Julie Harrison (Granary Books, 2004), Opposable Thumb (subpress, 2006), Homework (Lunar Chandelier, 2010),  Idea for a B Movie (Free Scholars Press, 2016), and An Everything (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024). He teaches English and lives in Brooklyn.

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