Joanne Kyger is the author of over thirty books and chapbooks. She lives on the coast north of San Francisco and teaches at the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Her most recent book On Time: Poems 2005–2014, published by City Lights, will be available in April 2015.

                                        How could you forget me so quickly––


                 But the way you   are reached,   touched,   awakened
                                  by the world   continues

                                                                                              the same way you
yourself
                                                    pass along a freely given
                              lineage of existence

                                              Each one, every thing, perfect ‘as is’

                                     Like the moon
                        going down
            never really leaves the sky

                                                                                So existence never quits,
                                                        never began,    never ended

                                            You   see    in the moment
                                                                                              So sorry it will
never be

                                   like this   again––

                    But when has the present ever been singular?

            Everything with a language of distinction

                                                                               with sorrow,   with

melancholy
                                                                    with sweet appreciation

                                                    of an extinguished future

                                      when water   becomes
                          a state of being

Stephen Motika was born in Santa Monica, California, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn and Mileses, New York. His first book of poems, Western Practice, was published by Alice James Books in 2012. Motika is the editor ofTiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman (2009) and the author of the poetry chapbooks In the Madrones (2011) and Arrival and at Mono (2007). Motika’s articles and poems have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine,BOMB, The Brooklyn Review, The Constant Critic, Eleven Eleven, Maggy, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Staging Ground, and Vanitas, among other publications. He has held residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace in New York, Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, New York, and Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in Berlin. He is the publisher of Nightboat Books, the artistic director of Poets House in New York, and is part of the Stonecoast MFA faculty at the University of Southern Maine in Portland.

In removing sidewalks from San Francisco, I planted trees, oaks and laurel. An arc by bay, I sat in parallel time, scratching the Velcro clasp of revealing and not revealing. Having made amends in a small space, we stepped lakeside, fostered beads and tears. The mist of God fell away, the paralysis instilled; I walked alone, books on fern morphology in hand, until the region of lawns unrolled. Tending to death, this untouched shade, we troubled, uncoupled. Lost to sweep of Queen Anne’s lace and leaflets, our errant grip slips, slack. Wrapped in English, sleep exhumed a theory at map’s edge, cast in ornament, artifice, my tongue an observer.