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

THE RIOTS

I knew you would mention the riots. That’s all anyone would talk about that day. All day I’d been drawn into conversations about them. All those images from the streets. You brought them up as soon as I saw you. I tried to change the subject as soon as you said the word. Riots. I couldn’t think clearly after that. I forgot what else had been on my mind, what I wanted to talk to you about. Are all our conversations like that? I want to talk about one thing and you want to talk about another, until one of us gets our way. I talked about the riots with you. We talked about what other people had said. We talked about effectiveness. We talked about political fallout. We connected action to intention, ideology to spectacle. And no matter how far we went in our analysis, you wouldn’t stop saying that word. Riots. Riots. I couldn’t not hear you saying it. I couldn’t not hear that word. It was as if suddenly, after all that talking, the riots were finally approaching, as if they were suddenly everywhere. It was as if we had started them.

Keith Newton is a writer, editor, and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. He is one of the creators of the forthcoming documentary series The Fourth Wall—premiered at the Tribeca Festival in 2023—an investigation into the New York–based psychotherapy cult known as the Sullivanians, in which Newton was raised until he was seventeen. His writing has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, and 1913, among others, and he edits the online literary magazine Harp & Altar. Looking backward from the crises of our moment, Newton’s first book of poems roams across time to explore our conflict with forces larger than ourselves. Moving from the elegiac to the cinematic to the essayistic, the poems in Revolutions Among Us draw on the many forms the past can take, as personal history diverges from collective memory.

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