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

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Entropy

 

Summer was pure entropy.

Burning everyone

who longed to touch it.

A liturgy of leaking away.

Virus & ennui and no tables

at Café X. Dumb heat-thrust and

green grass rising into nothingness

& faint shimmers of green smoke

like feints toward the real

movement at the very edge

of sight. All jump shots are

pure horizon, swish

and fade away.

We are such stuff

as form brings to being.

Out of the sacrilegious

dust this body will take

shape, this body will rise up

sweating into raptus

and the nothing

that makes us more than us.

The labor of making amends

without end

unceasingly encircles

our least last cares.

Here we are – at the end of

the edge of things.

Black blindfold grapple.

But to live means to

imagine elsewhere.

 

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Patrick Pritchett’s most recent book of poems, Refrain Series, appeared in 2020 from Dos Madres Press. His other books of poems are Orphic Noise, Song X, Gnostic Frequencies, and Burn. Scholarly work includes essays on Lorine Niedecker, Ronald Johnson, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Gustaf Sobin, and Michael Palmer He has taught at Harvard, Amherst College, and Hunan Normal University, and currently lectures in Comp Lit at Rutgers. His latest book of poems, Sunderland, will appear later this year from Spuyten Duyvil.

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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