CAConrad’s childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He is the author of eight books of poetry and essays. His latest book, titled ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Brooklyn and Seattle: Wave Books, 2014), received the 2015 Believer Poetry Award. In 2015 he was an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California. He has also received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Banff Centre, Ucross Foundation, RADAR Productions, and Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. He conducts workshops on (Soma)tic Poetry and Ecopoetics. He lives and writes in Asheville, North Carolina.

                    they requested a happier poem
                    the distinct sound of a backstab
                                     up in the stomach getting a fix on the signal
                                         leave vomit on the
                                       seat and tell them we
                                     are not sorry for any of it
                                   poke surrounding haystack in
                                 search of a                   slow song
                           excess is haunted by our poverty of benevolence
                                            but we grab a broader patch of shoulder
                                                         corrupt the smallest eyes in the
                                                                       freshly printed poem

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, visual artist, filmmaker, and political activist who addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Vicuña has published twenty-two art and poetry books, including Kuntur Ko (Tornsound, 2015), Spit Temple (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), Instan (Berkeley, Calif.: Kelsey Street Press, 2001), and Cloud Net (New York: Art in General, 2000). A new volume, Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press in 2016. Her art has been exhibited and collected at venues such as the Tate Gallery, London, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Chile, Santiago, and Museum of Modern Art, New York.

1

The hand breathes its innate rhythm, and the eye watches it, its gaze gliding across paper.

2

A fistful of forms, shawls unfurled without beginning or end, slender jacket topped with braids, seams turned inside out, exposed, hastily sewn and unfinished. A sumptuous addition to garbage art, a nascent disarmament workshop, a chapter of blood yielded in question and blow, a series of clusters, anonymous, worn, fortuitous. Stairs collapsing downwind, into deafness, into soft forms, to hear nothing, act as if nothing, that it would rain and eternally, to cross the line, unhinge, move against the tide. And begin again.

3

Everything intensi es and pierces as I watch and advance in pleasure, moistening and mutilating with wind jubilant lips as they ingestulate their proper flesh, instant juicer they proclaim out of pure delight, pure perverse pleasure, hellocinating in their own manner: manual pleasure.

It startles itself with the wellness of its making, self-sweetens, bewitches from within allowing its stay, it intoxicates the forehead, the lips of this looking.

The mouth watches its future swallow, enters it from behind, forges happily and in zig-zag squeals.

What I saw was a lively body desiderealing itself, libido-lit, embedexterous, engulfed in conjugal waters, lymphing behind its frigid, its feted voice, its raised mound and crown . . . its funk ground down, its scrawny aporia.

I did not see, as its face appeared, its hirsute well-then, you’re-never-around.

                                                                                                                                            You pound and I pulsate, my dear. Someone shimmies inside the house (joyfully cooking and dancing).

Someone in a domestic setting turns butterfly.