I can see them across the yard,

gaunt faces half-lit by Orion’s Belt,

the hacksaws against the window bars

sliding back and forth, like bows

of deranged fiddlers.

We, too, have been bolting

from one cell to the next, each

embedded inside the other, like hollow

dolls full of dusk and broken clocks.

Tier upon tier of coops, walkways’

clang of boots, and us under blankets,

itching to flee to a box with a higher roof,

its own sun and gold-leaf luck. A pen

of diamond walls, a yen for more yen,

softer feathers for our wings.

***

Peter Krumbach lives and writes in Southern California. His new collection “Degrees of Romance,” the winner of the 2022 Antivenom Poetry Award, will be published by Elixir Press in 2023. Most recent work is forthcoming from Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Washington Square Review and X-R-A-Y.

SCARLET began as a digital visual/poetic meditation on the psychological and physical toll of social isolation during the COVID-19 lockdown. The project has since evolved to document the social, political, and personal disruption of the pandemic as we move through its various mutations and surges.

The digital/visual poems are created through erasure of the novel The Scarlet Plague, by Jack London, collaged with glitched imagery from everyday life during the pandemic. The titles of poems in the series are then derived from objects contained in each glitched still life.

Glitching is a technique that introduces errors into the code of a digital file or stream that distorts its presentation. The error-induced fracturing of images in SCARLET is intended to defamiliarize everyday objects and surroundings to reflect the psyche under the constant stress of the pandemic.

The Scarlet Plague is a post-apocalyptic novel, published in 1912, set in California during the year 2073, after the world’s population is decimated by an uncontrollable pandemic.

The armadillo had seen enough
He sat on the bank and regarded the water

Almost blind
he remembered green
and the color right beneath green
and that memory made the load of anguish lift off
through the tips of his ears

And as he pondered the loveliness of pebbles
he found himself ambling
toward the water
submerging the way one falls
asleep

Eight expanding ripples
then the calm
No armadillo
only his exhale rising to the surface
in bouquets of dimes

Inverted
he sank farther into the stillness
that squeezed his scraped armor

He forgot directions
the pull of the earth
unsure what it was he came down here for

Letting go of sunlight
and the lake’s makeshift silver
the eyes in his tapered head began to harden
until they pierced the growing darkness
like the pupil-free gaze
of an abolished god

***

Peter Krumbach lives and writes in Southern California. His new collection Degrees of Romance, the winner of the 2022 Antivenom Poetry Award, will be published by Elixir Press in 2023. Most recent work is forthcoming from Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Washington Square Review and X-R-A-Y.

In the 1950s a CIA man designed a jail-break kit
that could be contained in a rectal suppository

He conceived tie-clip spy cameras and ultra-thin needles
to inject poisons into sealed bottles of wine

He tested mind-altering blends sometimes in fatal doses
on unsuspecting prisoners and brothel johns

Every day he’d return to his plumbing-free cabin
where he lived with his wife

All along he studied Buddhism meditated grew vegetables
got up before the roosters to milk his goats

After retiring he moved to India to volunteer in leprosariums

When I was three I wondered whether I’d sprouted
from the ground like a head of lettuce

It is the first thought I can remember
My first stride toward bewilderment

Today I saw a white shirt kiting high above the city
aimless like a ghost of a swan

Maybe we are meant to die of confusion
once it peaks and turns to awe

***

Peter Krumbach lives and writes in Southern California. His new collection Degrees of Romance, the winner of the 2022 Antivenom Poetry Award, will be published by Elixir Press in 2023. Most recent work is forthcoming from Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Washington Square Review and X-R-A-Y.

Wasp nest, abandoned, in the bare sugar maple.

Neighbor clear-cutting his acre. Clank, drop, scrape, clang. A child says, Where do the animals go? And the nests? I get a shivery feeling.

The gulch not yet iced over.

Red-tailed hawks glide lower than usual. Their silent white bellies.

Turning my head to speak, to show, I swallow a moth. The shrapnel of its thorax sticks in my throat.

Warm. Lightning in the morning. Rain pools around the snakehead, the iris stems risen four months early.

Storm drains blocked by oak leaves. On the highest limbs scraps linger like flimsy crows.

A sand-colored mouse hops puddle to pavement, puddle to pavement underneath an idling

SUV.

Woodsmoke. Roadkill: one squirrel, gray. Police horses circling in haze.

The same child says in his own voice, not the voice of a coyote or a rabbit, I thought I was going to be shot in line today. I kept telling myself, ‘You’re going to die today, you’re going to die today, you’re going to die today.’

The same wasp nest, pummeled by a night storm. Pulp in the street.

My child. My child.

***

Carolyn Oliver is the author of Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize. Carolyn’s poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, Radar, Shenandoah, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, Cherry Tree, Plume, DIALOGIST, and elsewhere.  (carolynoliver.net.) 

***

Francesco Levato is a poet, a literary translator, and a new media artist. Recent books include Arsenal/Sin Documentos; Endless, Beautiful, Exact; Elegy for Dead Languages; War Rug; Creaturing (as translator); and the chapbooks A Continuum of Force and jettison/collapse. He has collaborated and performed with various composers, including Philip Glass, and his cinépoetry has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Poetry, a PhD in English Studies, and is currently an Associate Professor of Literature & Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos. 

***

Francesco Levato is a poet, a literary translator, and a new media artist. Recent books include Arsenal/Sin Documentos; Endless, Beautiful, Exact; Elegy for Dead Languages; War Rug; Creaturing (as translator); and the chapbooks A Continuum of Force and jettison/collapse. He has collaborated and performed with various composers, including Philip Glass, and his cinépoetry has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Poetry, a PhD in English Studies, and is currently an Associate Professor of Literature & Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos. 

***

Francesco Levato is a poet, a literary translator, and a new media artist. Recent books include Arsenal/Sin Documentos; Endless, Beautiful, Exact; Elegy for Dead Languages; War Rug; Creaturing (as translator); and the chapbooks A Continuum of Force and jettison/collapse. He has collaborated and performed with various composers, including Philip Glass, and his cinépoetry has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Poetry, a PhD in English Studies, and is currently an Associate Professor of Literature & Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos. 

***

Francesco Levato is a poet, a literary translator, and a new media artist. Recent books include Arsenal/Sin Documentos; Endless, Beautiful, Exact; Elegy for Dead Languages; War Rug; Creaturing (as translator); and the chapbooks A Continuum of Force and jettison/collapse. He has collaborated and performed with various composers, including Philip Glass, and his cinépoetry has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Poetry, a PhD in English Studies, and is currently an Associate Professor of Literature & Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos. 

***

Francesco Levato is a poet, a literary translator, and a new media artist. Recent books include Arsenal/Sin Documentos; Endless, Beautiful, Exact; Elegy for Dead Languages; War Rug; Creaturing (as translator); and the chapbooks A Continuum of Force and jettison/collapse. He has collaborated and performed with various composers, including Philip Glass, and his cinépoetry has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Poetry, a PhD in English Studies, and is currently an Associate Professor of Literature & Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos.