Joe Hall
THE GREAT BEYOND, AGAIN
Who counts these hours? I know
even before a browser in the cold inlay of disgust
time pours into capsules. Cheryl,
you walked across the flooded path
in your green rubber boots.
We fell in behind a dad smoking
a joint, taking videos
of his rambling kids. Later you
turned to me and said,
“We’re going to die.”
The swan’s neck leafing
into a plant beside a window,
your celery, sardines, and lentils
depend on your hours being counted as pay,
walking the territory of sleep beside each other,
looking at the red eye blinking away
over the city, Buffalo, from any window.
Who counts the time that can’t be counted?
JOE HALL is based in Buffalo. His books of poetry include Fugue & Strike and Pigafetta Is My Wife. According to The Boston Globe, “Joe Hall’s poems move between a fist-pounding urgency, the fire and squelch of this moment of our endtime, and a vulnerability hushed and gentle as a nightgown on a laundry line.”
ISSUE FOURTEEN features poetry by Austin Araujo, Rae Armantrout, Aaron Baker, David Baker, Cal Bedient, John Berryman, Daniel Borzutzky, Izzy Casey, Colby Cotton, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Yongyu Chen, William Virgil Davis, Maggie Dietz, Kirsten Kaschock, David Kirby, Virginia Konchan, Timothy Liu, Airea D. Matthews, Ted Mathys, Erika Meitner, Olatunde Osinaike, Mary Ruefle, Natalie Shapero, Jordan Stempleman, and Matthew Tuckner; fiction by Tyler Barton, Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom, Tom Howard, and John Dermot Woods; nonfiction by Emmeline Clein, Aryn Kyle, David Stuart MacLean, and Justin Quarry; and Airea D. Matthews in conversation with Devon Walker-Figueroa.