design

The Art of Nothing

In works of art, just as design choices have both aesthetic and emotional impacts, so too does the absence of design. Ultimately, design also has environmental impacts, which can be brought about either by the materials used in a work or by the presence of the completed work. I was thinking about all of this while writing “The Art of Nothing.”

Two New York artists are vying
over rights to nothing. Both claim
ownership of the idea: a gallery
with empty walls, nothing standing
on the floor. Art historians concur:
the second artist to exhibit nothing
must acknowledge the first.

How about books with pages
not marred by words? Authors
can give readings where everyone sits
in silence for forty-five minutes,
then waits in line for an inscription.
All authors must give credit, of course,
to the first one to publish nothing.

Wikipedia already has a list of silent
musical compositions, starting with
Funeral March for the Obsequies
of a Deaf Man, 1897, by Alphonse Allais.
Why not invisible buildings to end
habitat destruction and global warming
and give the earth back to itself?

Ostranenie

by Laura Weldon

*Ostranenie* is a literary term coined by Russian writer and critic Viktor Shklovsky to describe how art takes reality out of context, making the ordinary seem strange.

Stare at any one thing
long enough
it recedes into form
without meaning.
Roof edge beyond the window
becomes a floating angle, abstract
against cloud-clotted background,
rain layered foreground.

Say anything over and over,
word you love or word you loathe
it reduces to sound,
to nonsense.
As a meditation,
this nudges us
closer to edges,
toward wilder realms rarely visited.

But be wary of ideas
ranted over and over.
They lose something too,
lose the softness of grass on bare feet,
of hand touching hand. They become
strictures against the way rain speaks,
barriers to what nourishes
the ground we are.

Surreal Expulsion

by D.R. James

—for Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

Fourteen chairs loiter, emptied, no young bodies
adjusting for the next lesson, hand-raising,
class-clown antic, contemplative talk, pat show
of teen contempt, rhythm beaten with pencil, palm,
bouncing knee, jouncing heel, wise-crack, step
in the impossible problem never to be solved.
Instead, more of the same news, the same vows
taxiing the hellish hallways of feigned intention
but never taking off—the same dazed moments
of the dead. Perhaps their freed spirits now see
through the coal-black tunnel of some eternity
right into the next school’s beehive of victims.
Perhaps they still shadow their three steady mentors
who stood staunch ground in the slow-motion flow
of high-speed ammo. The clip of names shoots holes
clean through law’s callous gut—

Aaron, Helena, and Alex,
Carmen, Peter, Cara, Chris, and Meadow,
Scott, Alaina, Martin, Alyssa, and Nick,
Jamie, Luke, Gina, and “Guac” Joaquin—

whose roll call
claims only an absurd third of a minute, while
their totaled lives witnessed nearly 5 thousand
wheels of the moon through some 75 trillion miles.
But unlike the pull of that implacable moon,
the glib fever of ‘prayers and condolences’ can’t
turn the tide of memory’s radiating its fixed
fissures scored by shards of glass and bone.
Here, we’re left to settle the moonscape of Too Late
for those whose expelled footsteps befuddle us.
And lauding immortality soothes no better. We
know we relax at our children’s peril, run rash risk
of shoring up the open/closed-carry-frenzied fight,
take false hope in the bundles of white-washed bills.
Anthony Borges took five bullets to shield twenty
surviving friends, sacrificed his soccer stardom
because somehow he knew what he had to do.
His lacerated back and shattered femur scream
in a language we now must teach across America.

—first published in Bullets into Bells

Walls

by Jeanne Wagner

A while back I was reading about Trump’s doubtful claim that women were being driven in cars across the Southern border for the purpose of sex trafficking. It made me think about walls in terms of the atavistic desire of any group, including protective fathers, to keep their daughters and wives away from the hands of outsiders.

Walls can’t stop night-blooming jasmine
from breaking and entering, can’t shut out
the tump da tump of the railroad ties,

a train whistle’s minor key turning
the lock in the door. That’s why fathers
build walls around their daughters,

who sooner or later welcome a lover
who’ll crash the gate like a freeloader,
flipping the latch with one prurient finger.

But fathers tell us we’ll always be prey
without a wall’s adobe bravura, straw
or wood or bricks well-laid. A wall

that glows when the sunset redlines it,
long before the hour fathers find
us lying in our beds, our defenses

down, our fences down; we’re closing
our blue-veined lids—worried thin.
But fathers warn us the roof’s a flint,

primed for sparks, every flame on call.
Nightmares scale us like migrants,
flout our fences, mole under borders.

We break out like prisoners of war
with maps that show where oceans rise,
the snow redacting our footprints.

The fairytale half-way house a myth.
Its walls smug with gingerbread that
sickens the blood. Flight a false lure,

because sooner or later the woodstove
ingests both the witch and her guests.
The only thing real is our fear.

Thunderbolt

by Edith Friedman

This poem was written the year my father turned 84. Our bodies are amazing examples of evolutionary design, and by the natural ends of our lives they will fail us.

At the high-ceilinged Afghan restaurant
Cutlery clinking, conversation clattering
Water glasses sweat in the Saturday heat
We’re dining on roasted cauliflower, on pomegranate-glazed eggplants
My father as usual can’t hear a damn thing
He eats slowly now,
But sits full elegant in his wine-dark Oxford shirt
and chestnut absent-minded professor cardigan
It has woven leather buttons

Long ago, he read to me at bedtime
The ten years’ trials of that wily voyager
Whose protectress always showed up
I loved Athena, wise daughter
Of a mighty father. From a mountainous armchair
He rained words down upon me
I never thought of his own decades

Now after years spent journeying to this place
In the restaurant it’s really time to go
The kids have left to feed the meter
Head down, my father chases Greek salad
across his plate
Fork failing him
He extends
his left forefinger,
and pushes diced cucumber
onto the tines.
Scylla of the public eye
Charybdis of hunger
Where to sail?

My father’s fork trembles against the china
He sets it down and gazes at us.
The body its own Trojan Horse
Foretold, inevitable
And all we have.
I should have said
On Olympus you can eat with your hands.