Poetry
The Proteins
As you stand there talking to me
and eating together we share six seeds
and upstairs in the light
I pick a pomegranate-type fruit
and through all the difficulty
of peeling flesh away from seeds
and through all the difficulty,
taking grapes, taking skin,
taking seeds, take six more
as you stand there talking
typing something on your laptop
viscera moves across the screen
taking seeds, taking six more
As we share together a number of seeds
you scrutinize, assigning a number to each letter.
Six seeds and six more upstairs,
peeling flesh from a seed
with the teeth of a carnivore,
intestines short and optimized
digesting letters and letters,
you stand there talking with me
while assigning tasks to an alphabet,
I note them on a notepad
while sharing bread with you
as you leave bread on my desk
and in my purse
digesting the schematics
of a system geared toward gears. Writing
on a notepad, while we
talk together of seeds
and assign time, six months
below and six above,
as the wheat sheaves arrive
to the office in droves,
you assign animals to people,
we break bread together
over the overdrives and reboot
the auxiliaries, maybe make
a pattern when test tones sound
as rehydrating fluids hang over
you, I pour water into your mouth.
As we walk to the river together,
as denatured carbon dioxide slides
over test subjects under full-spectrum
hydrophonic bulbs, as you clutch
your head and worry over figures,
I buy stock and watch mountains
and valleys, when looking through
a microscope, I hand to you
labeled seeds, six for you
and one for me, the blood
of a carnivore, you test
subjects and assign titles
when coworkers gaze
over the park, six months
above and another six below,
two weeks to think about seeds,
10 days, two more,
11 floating holidays, two
personal days, 21 sick days,
while we watch over parks,
and you stand there talking to us,
breaking bread together
analyzing and inventing.
Even as you scrutinize
operations in a microscope,
water pours out of your mouth.
I give you barley and wheat
builds moats of glycerine water.
Oil floats up, denatured carbon
releasing softly into air.
The mouth of a carnivore,
smiling with teeth of seeds, six
shared and six written down
I share with you
these months and redistribute
upstairs the memos of seasons,
pearly grains gleam against
wolf façade, as you talk
to us high above the park,
as water pours out of your mouth,
along with numbers, we share
together the harvests, and I come
with the pomegranate-type fruit
assigning to each a gain, a small feast
under the microscope.
Contributor
Marcella DurandMarcella Durand is the author of The Prospect (Delete Press, 2020) and a recent recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Editor’s Note
By Will ChancellorFEB 2021 | Fiction
This month were pleased to publish an excerpt from Vesna Marics The President Shop. The novels backdrop is an allegorical country, The Nation, steeped in tyranny, but the focus is on the human rather than the trappings of propaganda. I was struck by the young woman, Mona, decoding the timelessness thats always present, even as we pass through moments that are consciously historic. Symbology, by Betsy M. Narváez, abounds in images, meanings, dreams, and visions. Here, theres no official, waking world, little external at all. Narváez gives us resonant moments over coffee of a mother and a daughter unpuzzling the language of dreams. Were also tremendously fortunate to have Maisy Card stepping in as co-editor of the fiction section of the Brooklyn Rail. Her debut novel, These Ghosts are Family, masterfully courses through the history of a family while communicating the texture and hunger of life as it was lived.
Editor’s Note
By Paul MattickJUL-AUG 2022 | Field Notes
Its not going so well, is it? In Ukraine, Biden is prepared, it seems, to fight to the last Ukrainian, while preparing for the next war with China. Half the population of Afghanistan is facing starvation, especially since the US government has seized the billions of Afghan state assets, eked together out of opium sales and American aid, held in US banks.
Editors Note
By Paul MattickJULY/AUG 2023 | Field Notes
Despite constant assurances from officials that the economy is going just great, signs of trouble abound. To take a random sampling: it was just estimated that some 160,000 people are about to be evicted from their apartments in New York; defaults on junk bondswhich provide critical financing for many companiesare surging above 2021 and 2022 levels in response to rising interest rates; New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and other business centers are facing a likely collapse of the commercial real estate market, imperiling mortgage-holding regional banks while destroying local economies dependent on downtowns filled with office workers, many of whom are now working from home or recently fired; arcane indicators like the market for RVs, sensitive to downturns as an expensive discretionary purchase, are falling as before earlier recessions; while unemployment is rising significantly in over a dozen states. And thats just the United States.
Editor’s Note
MARCH 2021 | Fiction
This month, we bring you two works that explore the isolating effects of grief. In her short story “To the Sea,” Sharon Adarlo uses magical realism to explore the way a tragic event can change us. The protagonist at the center is so consumed by her grief after the death of her child that she must endure a kind of supernatural growth to overcome it. Beatriz Bracher structures novelsAntonio is the second of her four novels to be translated into English and published by New Directionsaround the peculiarities of narrative: uncertain recollections, overlooked characters, and crucial details hidden in plain sight. This novels central character, Benjamim, father to the titular Antonio, seeks the details of his own fathers life. But rather than follow Benjamim on the case, we're reading the fragments he collects. As readers, were substitute-detectives sorting through the accounts of three narrators and pinning our own red thread to the evidence.