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

Have you heard the one

about the man
sentenced to be hanged?
He is on the scaffold.

He has been told
to tie his own noose.
But he can’t. Never

learned. His executioners
are annoyed. What
are you, some kind of

idiot?  Some kind of
immigrant?  In our
God-great nation

everybody is free
to tie their own
noose.  Even our

children practice
on their bootstraps.
It’s the law–

the penalty for
ignorance is
death, by hanging.

An explanation of negative capability

My friend is working on photos of a church. He wants to know the color of holiness, the Pantone number of devotion & awe. I don’t ask questions like that. I prefer holiness to be impenetrable, to have no color, to absorb or reflect everything without betraying anything of itself. This is exactly why nobody reads your stuff, another friend would tell me. You care more about looking smart than about talking to people in a way that they understand. What’s the point? None of which is untrue, as far as it goes. There is no point in talking to people in a way that they understand. For instance, the friend who cares about talking & being understood would only ever say the thing I know they would say if they were very drunk, drunk enough that their thoughts started leaking out through their pores, as they did on that night in our twenties when we split a whole bottle of Wild Turkey between us, & we both wordlessly thought about going for a kiss & both wordlessly said no, no, I’d really rather not. We already understood. & it is true that I care most about sounding like myself. But I have no sound. My self is very small & hardly talks at all. I am famous for standing stock-still at parties. I will not dance. My jokes are flat and silent, like pressed flowers. I contain no multitudes, unless they’ll dance on the head of a pin. Still & stiletto, I contain nothing: I taper into it, sharp-ground & hollow; I shrink syringe-sharp, empty. Which is the trick. The point. Do you see? I’ve slipped into your skin.

movement workshop

When I call
to my sadness
it hides from me

and shrinks
shuffles its feet
back behind

the curtains
like a Danish prince:
then my sadness

grows playful.
Likes to play
hide and seek.

Burrows under
the blankets jumps
up yelling surprise

surprise you won
you won the prize—
I could almost

love sadness
then.  But I’m
never surprised.

Sam Cha was born in Korea. He earned his MFA from UMass Boston. A Pushcart Prize winner, he’s been published and anthologized widely. He’s the author of The Yellow Book (PANK, 2020), a collection of cross-genre work. Long a resident of Cambridge, MA, he now lives in Brooklyn with his family, as well as two cats and one extraordinarily long-lived guinea pig.

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