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

Going in and out

Saturday’s dusty syllables stir

a waking fold that’s intricate,

etched with sudden shapes

thieved and flung backwards and sky

reminds me that no place is eternal;

rope perforates and shreds, threads

sponge the ink in my head

to spread a rumor, dart in a dark circle

that surrenders night to us, going

in and out, in and out, like stars breathe

and now your hand spreads air flat

’round us, describes what you and

no one else wants to see, who don’t

see their part in any thing, they just part

the air. Here. Like there’s a line to link

back all the threads from Friday and press

them back to before they began.

Poet and visual artist Laurie Price was in the first graduating class at Naropa’s (then Institute) Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 1981 and has since published poetry and made and exhibited visual art (laurie-price.com). Courtesy of a generous year-long Gerbode Foundation Poetry grant received in 1993 she moved to Oaxaca, Mexico to begin her life as a citizen of the world. She’s since lived in Morocco, Spain, and since 2013, resides, again, in Oaxaca, Mexico. She has two full-length collections (Except for Memory [Pantograph Press, Berkeley, CA, 1993] and Radio at Night: Recent and Selected Work [Lunar Chandelier Press, 2013] plus four chapbooks. Her work has appeared in Talisman, Eoagh, HOW2, Big Allis, Arshile, The East Village and Fence, among other magazines. A new collection, entitled These Pages Once Were Skin is forthcoming in 2024 from Spuyten Duyvil Press.

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