What medicine has dawn given anyone. It is an emptiness
after night retreats behind documents & barricades.
How else do you dramatize this dusk except as a fire,
or any wilder light. An inferno motions constantly
toward the earliest hours of the day, &
how do you check its limits from the middle.
Everyone understands passive expressions of the body,
the physical facts of rooms; the accounting for the cost
of air. But, how many sounds are made per hour
until there are no more. Like geometric forms,
there’s only proof of them after the fact, their shapes
unfolding like a dollar bill.
A vortex of gulls circles the immense aviary of violence;
the pantomime of a building in its apparel; a cage
where everyone is expected to disappear. Looking at
something that was there—that’s either a retrospective
or a ghost.
Evening only has one door, & if you look hard enough
it is a glass house or a mirror. A room with a ceiling, & no floor.
What is grotesque but a non-committal term for something you admit
you recognize in yourself. & you can hide anything under such an abyss.
READ MORE
An Architect’s Guide to the Grenfell Tower Fire [Architizer]
The Grenfell Tower Fire and London’s Public Housing Crisis [The Atlantic]
Douglas Luman’s poetry and prose has been published in magazines such as Salamander, Ocean State Review, Rain Taxi, and Prelude. He is Production Director of Container, Art Director at Stillhouse Press, Head Researcher at appliedpoetics.org, a book designer, and digital human. His first book, The F Text, will be released in fall 2017 on Inside the Castle.
Editorial art by Elle Aviv Newton.
