ETHAN
BULL
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"Poets
are born, not made." It escapes me now who coined those infamous words. I
suppose it is an injunction against the industry of creative writing entrenched
in our various academic institutions, and yet by instinct, what poet born would
not seek out his own kind, be starved for the kind of training necessary to
nurture such a vocation devalued by the reigning social order? I have seen such
winged appetites again and again over the years-hatchling, fledgling,
soaring-as, one by one, their voices made their way into the manifold literary
landscapes that comprise our disunited states of American letters, its tentacular sprawl so well-documented in these very pages.
So when Zach asked that I send a debutant his way, I welcomed the onus,
zeroing-in on two or three contacts from that rolodex of the mind, but in the
end, there was no question of choosing whom. It was Maria Callas who once said
that one must not make one's debut too early. In her master classes at
Julliard, she also remarked, "When a colleague sings to you, try to forget
the rehearsals; make your reactions seem as though you are hearing what he is
saying for the first time." Enter Ethan Bull, horns caught between world and
mind, erecting an idyll beyond the monotony deigned by mundane normalcy, his
compassionate disgust troubling him into speech. A born poet, he is in command
of the made thing-poem after poem taking flight.
-Timothy Liu
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UNCOILED
We feared the Father from the very
beginning
in his lumberjack
flannel, arms pierced by black
coils of hair, veins
opened like snakes. Seven
days he poured, skin
razed to suns who culled
neighbors with matches,
letting himself forget.
We didn’t fear his atheism, dense in the
fog of
argument, Rousseau
whispering from the trapeze
of his boughs or his
authority on everything
he did not know. We fought staunch in that
light at his return, pulling
up floorboards, trying
to gain admittance to
the center at least, heaving
at legs until both
were red. We didn’t fear his
absence, those hours
logged in democracy, its
pages read proudly and
dusty on shelves, cigarette
ashes in our hair as
snowflakes, somehow earned,
colored in the strict
tears of homework or with
the delicacy of
finger-picking. He was still
the color of the sun,
even when he was no longer
long and lean. We only began to fear the father
again when he
entered that realm of mystery, his
silhouette on the telephone
pulling on the white
edges of cupboards for
balance, no longer shaping
the molten facets of
that language into tepid drips,
his lips fluttering as
the limp caterpillars folded
together on his
forehead. He fell backwards
the day I pushed him—
NIGHT:
BEFORE
It was all simple until I woke up
in his bed this
morning, shuffling
feet to headaches and
dredging
memory for the other
aches,
the jagged stilts of
dark basements
in Buenomolinas, that pin-stripe
wept to a floor, I
think—my stomach
tanned like beef and
pushed out
embarrassed under a shirt
covered
with lilies,
green-stemmed against
powder blue like the
silhouette
of a birth pushing
against the veins—
too obvious, he said,
smoke bleeding
holy into pores, men
redefined
by their sperm, dirt
brushing at itself
around the edges, the
pale fronds—
PORK
PRODUCT
My family created a fuming mishmash of
dairy
and pork dawning big
dippers of effervescent
candied ham, rain-slicker
potato pancakes soggy
leaning into giant apple
sauce puddles and sour
cream. Next year I swear we’ll run out of Gefilte
fish and substitute
Viennese cocktail wieners,
drink two-percent from
Elijah’s cup. Below
the white macramé belt
my dad made my mom
in 1973, our
yarmulkes are hidden in the top drawer
of my parents’
dresser. We wore them once a year
at our annual Seder
(except Dad, atheist). Baruk
atah adonai,,,,I can’t remember the
rest but we did
that until I flunked
out of Hebrew school where I
was a Talmud
delinquent; they called my parents
one too many
times. No Bar-Mitzvah—or is it Bat-
Mitzvah?—Mom was disappointed a little but
she’s
the one who left the
Wailing Wall and the rest
of some Zionist
commune after only a week because
she was in love with
my father, the
small feet who went to
Yale: no cowboy or believer.
Now our bent Seder drips pot-roast gravy
like the
sanded road’s melted
snow. We eat matzah
and
horseradish, we won’t even dip
the parsley—garnish
we clobber against
the side of the platter, ignore.
LOVE
LETTER
Street dogs eat tripe from the smogged corners of Wal-Mart; Tequila, the stench of limes
and El Presidential shrubbery. Kerouac
rambled about sex and love and sex: betrayal was not in his vocabulary. There is very little in that. In
I.
She was a tender piston fathered at
irregular intervals,
his pint glass
mislaid, crushed under cushions, alliterated
by his own stale breath
while whispering against the traps
of each indented
syllable tipped like salt shakers—
syrup sticky only around
the edges, her knees fallen.
II.
He disappears but his history is hung
around her neck
like simple jewellery, a childhood waiting patiently
for some gift—wrapped
pink plastic dresses—each pulse
like steak chewed
tender, a daughter built by hand
now tied and ready for
work, his veins tense and upright.
III.
No place to cry, spaces where the shoulders
should have
been, an arrhythmic clarity
cut by linoleum footprints
forever walking further
East—leather encrusted with rain
behind that sugary
innocence—curtains like milk-tempered
syringes, a coupon
carefully taped into high blond corners.
RIDDLE
IN F SHARP
Q.
What is this typed nightmare,
its fecund breath
stirring those
innermost pigeons of dense
art,
of fatigue? That redness
of imagining novels
plucked
in fur handbags,
whistling
at each page. Water,
still
in the cold depths,
but, in
the absence of it, I will
find it,
(they say):
forever peeling onions
brings tears, not
self. Where
is the mocked
contentment
floating on wide-eyed
lagoons
and lipstick, lids
sticky with flesh?
There is the wisdom of Apollo,
smiling, wishing his arms
would
re-grow in memory, not that
fucking
torso
again rippling
its marbled claws,
solipsistic
in the depths of its
sullen ego.
Not Narcissus, mind you, nor
focus, nor breath, but
that whisp-
ered conversation
through
forked-teeth, steel serpents
hissing into the alliterative
decay, this
precision. Ignore
the pink pulling up
the edges,
windows flattened by hand-
prints and spinčd backs, set
against brick yellow
mid-riffs
in Dexter’s
Garden. Wonder
at the lines in
bellies, at edges,
at page-breaks, at
the flexing
of everyone else’s
bladders—
A.
Lunch with white plastic
lawn chairs, grass on
roofs
whose eyes tick
impatiently
against that river. The burning
is in the exhibition Robert,
not angry but frank,
his two
first names plagiarized
in the puns of grottoed beiges
or trundled blues or melonned
dark like the
distillation of self
into a second chance
never
given by God or purity,
his
book-store combover the kind
of wisdom on mainstreet, of self-
repetition (in spite of all
the other
kinds). As long
as you know
the
references or the smoke
stacked as dapper quilts,
delicate
in the must of
cigarettes blended
into the simplicity of
symbols.
Do
not fail, that mouth contrite
as whales slivered in
dim and
reflecting all but light,
stapling
heartbeats into email
messages,
gold tacks pressed
firmly
with hooves into my
hands, warmed
by the backs of
necks—sepia
to the colorblind,
clocks set to gold
leaf. Easier made
from steam
rising from bald heads,
moist
as that buoy spelled
strangely
at home, that chalice
disappearing
beneath its own serpentine
bridges.
THE
FORM
Me so white with the paleness singeing
newfound wings, those
clouds stapled
to sky as trees to
earth. But somehow,
through the darkness,
visible, drowning
between waves soft with
foam, waiting
with curled hair, this
body’s a stomach
over belts pushed in,
held in at breaths
inspected. Here the fade of Narcissism
twists knuckles into
faces, elbows into
marble, writing into
tulips—again that
image, third in line to
pay, revisited on
the twenty-sixth
fervent cerulean count.
The heart here burgeons as Prospero, his
Caliban between each tread of fat like
deodorant, like the peerless
taste of wrists
over steel frames
seeking self-love on lips
and balding heads. That menu painted
yellow and hidden on
walls, the words
even contorted at each
line’s end, even
meaning tripping into the
feeble dawn,
the time well-lighted
and lukewarm.
Where if not here? The self is not just
me, it is not simply chewed
at with open
mouths spitting into this
perfidious squall.
SOMEWHERE
between
window, an effluent
triangle
brimmed as an ashtray—the
lyric
of it opened into the
myopic dawn
unable to radiate
anything anymore—
the pancakes papery, bejewelled
by the silk dust of
an afternoon—
but I was waiting,
confused
by the demure
flatness, flippant
about the stairs—scarves
tipping
themselves to expose the soft
belly
of their interior
ever so lightly here—
an infamy not sought
but lined
triumphant, underlined with
smears
of white paint dapper
with speak only
said to oneself,
alone—can the stalk
of a stale cigarette
become the stable
of all that perfume,
the musk walls
of a pale room
silently unplugged?—
I wonder whether waiting itself
was a solipsistic
dropping of my
ego spoken quickly and
illegibly into
the telephone, whether
I wanted her or
the tiara hanging from
the papal bed
of his pages ripened
by the stiff binding
that creaked with each
new footstep
whistling coyly away into
silence.